Transcultural Wars: from the Middle Ages to the 21st Century 9783050049953, 9783050041315

Citation preview

Transcultural Wars

Transcultural Wars from the Middle Edited

Ages to the 21st Century

by Hans-Henning Kortiim

Akademie

Verlag

Cover illustration: Richard Coeur de Lion (tll99) unhorses Sultan Saladin (t 1193). Miniature in the Lutrell-Psalter. The British Library / Bridgemann Art Library. Man. Add. 42130, F. 82. Soldiers of the 1st Infantry Division in front of the Golden Mosque in Samarra, Photo Courtesy of U.S. Army. Department of Defense.

Iraq (6.10.2004).

ISBN-10: 3-05-004131-5 ISBN-13: 978-3-05-004131-5

© Akademie Verlag GmbH, Berlin 2006

Printed

on

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All rights reserved (including those of translation into other languages). No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by photoprinting, microfilm, or any other means nor transmitted or translated into a machine language without written permission from the publisher. -

-

Coverdesign: milchhof : atelier, Hans Baltzer, Berlin Printing and Binding: Druckhaus „Thomas Müntzer" GmbH, Bad Langensalza Printed in

Germany

Contents

Editor's Preface.

7

i. introduction

Hans-Henning Kortüm Clash of Typologies

The Naming of Wars and the Invention of Typologies.

11

-

ii. General Typology of Transcultural Wars

Stephen Morillo A General Typology of Transcultural Wars -

The Early Middle Ages and Beyond.. 29

Michael Prestwich Transcultural Warfare -

The Later Middle Ages. 43

Bernhard R. Kroener

Antichrist, Archenemy, Disturber of the Peace. Forms and Means of Violent Conflict in the

Early Modern Ages.

57

Hew Strachan

A General

Typology of Transcultural Wars

The Modern Ages. 85 -

iii. Rules of War and War without Rules Matthew Strickland Some Reflections

Rules of War or War without Rules?

on

Conduct

-

and the Treatment of Non-Combatants in Medieval Transcultural Wars.107

Contents

6 Martin

van

Creveld

A Tale of Two Wars.141

IV. Sexual Violence in Wars Corinne Saunders The Middle

Sexual Violence in Wars

Ages.151

-

Birgit Beck-Heppner Gender

Specific Crimes in Wars of the Modem Age.165

V. Concepts and Stereotypes of the Enemy and their Function Hannes Möhring

The Christian

Concept of the Muslim Enemy during the Crusades.185

Michael Hochgeschwender

Enemy Images in the American Civil War A Case

Study

on

-

Their Function in a Modem

Society.195

VI. Protagonists of War Plurality of Violence and its Monopoly -

Andrew Ayton Armies and Combatants in

From Muhi to Mohâcs -

Later Medieval

European Transcultural Wars.213

Daniel Höhrath

Soldiers and Mercenaries,

Protagonists in Trans-Cultural Wars

in the Modem Ages.249

Indices Index locomm.261 Index personarum.265 Index rerum.268

Editor's Preface

From 31st March to 2nd April 2004, a conference with the title "Transcultural Wars from the Middle Ages to the 21st Century" was held in Regensburg. This conference received financial support from the German Research Foundation, the Hamburg Institute for Social Research and the Regensburg University Foundation. The publication of this volume has been made possible thanks to a subsidy from the German Research Foundation. The conference was organized by the Hamburg Institute for Social Research (Prof. Dr. B. Greiner, Dr. M. Hoch und Dr. D. Walter) and the Regensburg Research Group "Forms and Functions of War in the Middle Ages". To all of these I owe my thanks. I would also like to thank my colleagues (Dr. M. Clauss, PD Dr. A. Hack, Dr. J. Knödler and M. Völkl, M.A.). Finally, I wish to thank E. Völcker, who laid out the manuscript as well as the English translator, Dr. R. Dunphy. Two prime considerations shaped the aims and methods of the conference. Firstly, it linked research on medieval, early modern and modem war to reach a mutually beneficial clarification of terms and concepts currently in use. Due to the constants linking both medieval and modem wars, it seems necessary to revise the traditional conception of the year 1500 as an epochal shift, which has been established for practical rather than plausible reasons. The similarities, rather than the differences, between medieval and modem wars were the focus of the conference. By identifying and describing these, we hoped to clarify the terminology in current use and the understanding of war in general. Each session was chaired jointly by a representative of Medieval History and a representative of Modem History, so that both could contribute the insights of their respective disciplines. The intention was not to present familiar arguments twice over, but to compare structures of different periods, working out the similarities and considering the relevance of the Middle Ages to the modem world. Secondly, the conference considered questions of war typologies, focusing particularly on key topics for our understanding of war. The categories of transcultural and intracultural wars served as a point of departure and as an example of forms of wars which are important for both the Middle Ages and the Modem Period.

8

Editor 's Preface

The sequence of the individual contributions corresponds to that of the conference programme: the Middle Ages and the Modem Period were to be linked to each other as

closely as possible. Our hope is that the essays published here will convey to the reader something of the productiveness of the discussions which took place at the conference.

Regensburg, August 2005

Hans-Henning Kortiim

I. Introduction

Hans-Henning Kortüm

Clash of Typologies The Naming of Wars and the Invention of -

Typologies

Introduction On 1st

May, 2003 exactly seventy days after the outbreak of war the American Commander-in-Chief, George W. Bush, declared the end of the Iraq war: "Mission accomplished". The current list of American losses shows how wrong the President was: the troops of the "Coalition of the Willing" have suffered higher losses since the end of the war was announced by the White House than in the period of active fighting against the Iraqi forces.1 The war as such was therefore not at an end, only a certain form or type of war. War, to borrow a famous phrase from Carl von Clausewitz, has changed its appearance like a chameleon.2 A 'classic' war, in which state forces were in open combat, has been succeeded by a different war. Both wars have been described in a multitude of ways. Depending on the point of view, the first phase of the military conflict the one which came closest to a 'classic war between states' was variously referred to as a 'preventive war' or a 'war of -

-

-

-

liberation'. This was the official version of the American government. Liberals and leftof-centre intellectuals took the view that it was a 'war of aggression' or a 'war which broke international law'. On the other hand, members of the former Iraqi administration in particular, but also many Iraqis who were critical of the regime, preferred to speak of a 'defensive war' or even a 'holy war'. The present continuing state of war has likewise been given various names. Here again, the term 'holy war' is used, as well as terms as 'guerrilla war', 'war of terror', 'civil war', 'insurgency' and so on.

2

Casualty figures from 19.03. through 01.05.2003: 137 American soldiers through 14.03.2005, 1379 Americans killed in Iraq in total. Source: http://www.antiwar.com/casualties/ (as of 15.05.2005).

killed. From

May

2003

Carl von Clausewitz, On War, ed. and transi. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton 1976), p. 89 (book I, chapter 1, § 28): "War is more than a true chameleon that slightly adapts its characteristics to the given case".

Hans-Henning Kortüm

12

In the light of these extremely varied descriptions for one and the same war, we may be inclined to speak of a 'clash of typologies'. This applies especially when the typological descriptions used actually contradict each other, as in the case of 'defensive war' and 'war of aggression'.

Use of Type: the

Example of'Old' and 'New' Wars

terminological uncertainty has generally arisen. The classical concept of war can no longer adequately describe all current wars. This is because such a term principally refers to the kind of wars which are waged between states. For this reason, the English political scientist, Mary Kaldor, also suggested a number of years ago that we should differentiate between 'old' and 'new' wars.3 There are four principal criteria which distinguish between 'new' and 'old' wars: In the context of recent wars,

a

1. Factions in conflict: in contrast to 'old' wars, in 'new' wars there are, as well as national units, ethnically-defined groups, which operate in coalitions which

organised can

alter

quickly.

2. The type of forces that are involved: in 'new' wars, small, decentrally-organised groups frequently fight in various compositions and with no connection to the state. Chain of command and a monopoly on the use of force under political command do not exist, or have no permanence. Mercenaries are often used. 3. War economy: the 'new wars' use a war economy which is globally organised. They are either independent of or less dependent on organised national economies. Materials required for war are, accordingly, supplied by economic areas which are scattered throughout the world. War entrepreneurs the so-called warlords live and profit from -

-

war.

frequently 'new wars' are 'low intensity conflicts'.4 The aim of the to factions is not conquer areas in the classical sense, that is, in order to occupy warring them. Rather, the intention is to destabilise these areas politically in order to impose the faction's own political influence. Extensive military confrontations, the major risk of a decisive battle, are avoided. Military violence is directed principally against civilians.

4. The methods of warfare:

3

4

Cf. Mary Kaldor, New and Old Wars. Organized Violence in a Global Era, 2nd ed. (Stanford 2001), p. 14. For the characterisation of this term, which has been common since the 1980s., see Martin van Creveld, Die Zukunft des Krieges, new edition with a preface by Peter Waldmann, transi. Klaus Fritz and Norbert Juraschitz, 3rd revised ed. (Hamburg 2004), pp. 48-51.

Clash

of Typologies

13

Other authors have followed Mary Kaldor in their analyses.5 A more accurate historical observation shows that the 'new wars' are not so new after all. Almost all of these new forms of war presumably existed in the past, in Antiquity and in the Middle Ages.6 From this point of view, the "transformation of war"7 proposed by Martin van Creveld turns out to be a return to older forms of war: War is going back to its roots. In other words, from a long-term historical perspective, the classical state and national wars fought from the 18th to the middle of the 20th century are in fact exceptional. The sociologist Wolfgang Sofsky designated these 'new wars' as 'wild wars', the purpose of which is not to achieve state power, change the borders of a nation or to defend a political or cultural identity. Wild war is waged for its own sake, for it nourishes those who wage it.8 In the light of the many and various types of war used, the obvious question is, which intellectual processes control the formation of such categories and what we can learn from them?

Formation of Types and Intellectual Processes On

18th July, 2003, the Süddeutsche Zeitung reported the following: Eleven weeks after the end of the war was announced, the US army has for the first time described the constant attacks on their soldiers in Iraq as 'guerrilla warfare'. The new supreme commander of the American troops in Iraq, General John Abizaid, said that followers of the former Saddam regime have formed cells which are in "a classical guerrilla-type war against us" [Süddeutsche Zeitung, 18th July, 2003, p. 1],

Quite obviously, a categorical division of wars lies behind the statement of the US general. As well as 'normal' wars, so to speak, there is a clearly-distinguishable special type of war, the 'guerrilla war'. The attribution of this special war as 'classical' makes clear that it refers to an established category of war, the classicism of which lies in the fact that it can be clearly distinguished. 'Classical' means as in other cases from the fields of literature, music, architecture, and so on a clear distinction by mass and -

-

5

6

7 8

Cf. e.g. Herfried Münkler, Über den Krieg. Stationen der Kriegsgeschichte im Spiegel ihrer theoretischen Reflexion (Weilerswist 2002), pp. 221 and elsewhere, réf. to Kaldor; Herfried Münkler, Die neuen Kriege, 5lh ed. (Reinbek 2003); the term 'Kleiner Krieg' is also used in military history, e.g. Bernd Greiner, "Zwischen 'Totalem Krieg' und 'Kleinen Kriegen'. Überlegungen zum historischen Ort des Kalten Krieges", Mittelweg 36 (2003), vol. 2, pp. 3-20, and Martin Hoch, "Die Rückkehr des Mittelalters in der Sicherheitspolitik", WebTrends 35 (2002), pp. 17-34, hereesp. pp. 18-23. Cf. Stig Förster, "Die neuen Kriege: Was tun mit den alten Instrumenten?", Arbeitskreis Militärgeschichte, newsletter 10 (2005), vol. 1, pp. 6-11, here p. 8. Martin van Creveld, The Transformation of War (New York 1991). Wolfgang Sofsky, Zeiten des Schreckens. Amok, Terror, Krieg (Frankfurt a.M. 2002), here p. 148.

Hans-Henning Kortüm

14

proportion, by principles of building and form, which are based on a classical example which is regarded as a pattern. Refering to guerilla war as a classical type means that it is derived from

a

concrete

historical event, in this

case

from the involvement of the

Napoleonic occupation forces in Spain in the conflict from 1808 to 1812. Contemporary military theory of the 19th century already understood 'guerilla war' as a specific war type. For instance, Clausewitz speaks of a war which has "become a popular cause in its own right."9 Drawing on the etymology, the terms 'Kleinkrieg' or 'little war' are also used.10 Other designations compete with 'guerilla war' such as 'irregular war', 'popular revolt' and 'partisan war'.11 In the second half of the 20th century, the academic military history of the west, startled by the liberation movements in the Third World, attempted in various ways to characterise the phenomenon. This way, Werner Hahlweg, for example, spoke of "Guerilla" as "Krieg ohne Fronten" (a "war with no fronts") and Gerhard Schulz spoke of "Partisanen und Volkskrieg" ("partisans and people's war").12 In order to characterise 'guerilla war', the following characteristics, among others, have been cited: small contingents, absence of rules of engagement, particularly concealed warfare, war without precisely-defined fronts, and the blurring of distinctions between combatant and non-combatant.13 If one looks at the extensive literature on war14 which has been published in recent times, it is noticeable that,

as a rale, the types of war are used as set terms, without the authors necessarily stating how they understand or define the various categories. The formation of types in itself is often not analysed more closely, or else it is taken for granted. In an academic consideration of various wars and types of war, this is not entirely without problems. There are however notable exceptions. Von Trotha, for instance, in his "Typologie kriegerischer Aktionsmacht" distinguishes three principal forms of war: namely, 'total war', 'pacifying war' and 'neo-Hobbesian war' and

9

10

von Clausewitz, On War (see above, n. 2), p. 592 (book 8, chapter 3 B): "The Spanish War spontaneously became the concern of the people." Cf. Carl von Clausewitz, "Meine Vorlesungen über den Kleinen Krieg", in: Carl von Clausewitz, Schriften Aufsätze Studien Briefe, ed. Werner Hahlweg, Deutsche Geschichtsquellen des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts 45, vol. 1 (Göttingen 1966), pp. 208-599, pp. 228-264. Modern military history also uses the term "Kleiner Krieg", e.g. Bernd Greiner, "Zwischen 'Totalem Krieg' und 'Kleinen Kriegen'" (see above, n. 5), pp. 3-20, and Martin Hoch, "Die Rückkehr des Mittelalters" (see above, n. 5), pp. 18-23. Cf. Wemer Hahlweg, Guérilla. Krieg ohne Fronten (Stuttgart 1968), p. 21. Wemer Hahlweg, Guérilla (see above, n. 11); Gerhard Schulz and Bernd Bondwetsch, eds., Partisanen und Volkskrieg. Zur Revolutionierung des Krieges im 20. Jahrhundert (Göttingen

Carl

-

'1 12

13

14

-

-

1985).

The characteristics named can be found for example in Hahlweg, Guerilla (cf. above, n. 11), pp. 22f. Cf. recently Andreas Herberg-Rothe, Der Krieg. Geschichte und Gegenwart (Frankfurt 2003).

Clash

15

of Typologies

his attempt to differentiate in more detail. At the same time, this author is forced to fall back on other typologies of war in describing his wars, in order to characterise the three principal forms more closely. He speaks, among other terms, of 'holy war', 'Cold War', 'War of Battles', 'War of Assassinations' and 'terrorist attacks', of 'assault' and 'ambush', of 'shoot-outs', of 'skirmishing' and 'small engagements'16 without arriving at a more precise classification of these additional and rather problematic consider for instance the term 'holy war' types of war.17 Their status and function remain unsolved: is their role merely descriptive? Are these additional types of war but ones which, in the author's opinion, are not deserving of the status of a principal form; or are they only competing synonyms?18 Herberg-Rothe offers a differentiating overview19: he, too, wishes to distinguish three basic types of war: 'State War' ('Staatenkrieg'), 'Civil War' and 'non-State Wars' ('nicht-staatliche Kriege'). Herberg-Rothe notices however, with justification, the circumstance that "the event of war.. .on the contrary [is] very often indicated by a mixture of forms".20

justifies

-

-

Formation of Types of War using 'Intension' If one attempts to analyse the genesis of a historical type closely, the process of forming type could be described as follows. As an example in this case, we have singled out the type 'Guerrilla War': a concrete historical event (in this case, the fighting of armed a

15

16 17

18

19 20

von Trotha, "Formen des Krieges. Zur Typologie kriegerischer Aktionsmacht", in: Ordnungen der Gewalt. Beiträge zu einer politischen Soziologie der Gewalt und des Krieges, eds. Sighard Neckel and Michael Schwab-Trapp (Opladen 1999), pp. 71-95. Cf. von Trotha, "Formen" (see above, n. 15), p. 76 ('heiliger Krieg'), p. 88. In both public and academic discussion the term 'holy war' has become practically inflationary. As far as medieval research on this topic is concerned, we point to Alexander Pierre Bronisch, Reconquista und Heiliger Krieg. Die Deutung des Krieges im christlichen Spanien von den Westgoten bis ins frühe 12. Jahrhundeii, Spanische Forschungen der Görresgesellschaft, Zweite Reihe 35 (Münster 1998), pp. 202-234 (as far as the problematic nature of this term is concerned, the author offers here a review of 'holy war' and its delimitation from 'Just War' and 'Crusade'). Cf. von Trotha, "Formen" (see above, n. 15), p. 88: "...haben die Kleinen Kriege viele Namen erhalten. Sie heißen 'Guerilla'- oder 'Partisanenkrieg', 'Begrenzter Krieg', 'Krieg geringer Intensität' ('low intensity warfare'), auch 'Bürgerkrieg', oder im rechtfertigenden Sprachgebrauch der kriegführenden Parteien, 'nationaler Befreiungskrieg', 'Befreiungskampf, 'Terrorismus', 'Polizeiaktion' oder 'Terrorismusbekämpfung', um nur einige der verbreiteten Begriffe zu benennen", ["...the 'Kleinen Kriege' have been given many names. They are called 'guerilla' or 'partisan' war, 'limited warfare', 'low intensity warfare', even 'civil war' or, in the self-justifying language of the warring parties, 'national war of liberation', 'liberation struggle', 'terrorism', 'police operation', or 'combat against terrorism', to name only some of the widespread terms"]. Cf. Herberg-Rothe, Krieg (see above, n. 14), pp. 24-43. Herberg-Rothe, Krieg (see above, n. 14), p. 25.

Trutz

16

Hans-Henning Kortüm

Spaniards against the French army of occupation between 1808 and 1812) has a descriptive set of characteristics applied to it. This set of characteristics (in terms of quantity theoretically tending towards infinity) serves to constitute a 'name' or 'type',

in this case 'Guerrilla War', which indicates a different set of characteristics from, say, one for the category 'war between states'. It is clear that the category 'war between states' is insufficient for adequately describing the phenomenon of'belligerent conflicts in Spain 1808-1812'. For this reason a new category, a new 'type' is formed in this case 'Guerrilla War' whose set of characteristics differentiates it from the category 'war between states'. In what follows, we refer to this process, by analogy to linguistic convention, as 'intension'.21 To show the process of intension clearly applied to a second example, the term 'Crusade' has been chosen. The formation of the type 'Crusades' is constituted here in the historical event 'campaign of western Christians to Palestine to conquer Jerusalem, 1096-1099'. The following characteristics are among those assigned to the type of war 'Crusade': a war undertaking initiated and legitimised by the pope, religious motivation of the participants, campaign as act of penance, absolution as spiritual reward of the war, strong and numerous numbers of troops, fighting to regain Christian areas or extend the rule of western Christianity.22 -

On the concept of intension cf.: Anton Hugh and Poul Lübcke, eds., Philosophielexikon. Personen und Begriffe der abendländischen Philosophie von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart (Reinbek 1991), pp. 179f.: "Intension wird generell als Sinn, Extension als Bedeutung (Referenz) verstanden. Die Intension eines (vorgebrachten) Satzes ist das Urteil, das er ausdrückt; die Extension eines generellen Ausdrucks ist der allgemeine Begriff, den er ausdrückt; seine Extension ist die Menge der Gegenstände, auf die der Ausdruck zutrifft. Die Intension eines singulären Ausdrucks ist der Begriff, den er ausdrückt; seine Extension ist der Gegenstand, auf den er sich bezieht." ["Intension is generally understood as sense, an extension as meaning (reference). The intension of a (proposed) sentence is the judgement which it expresses; the extension of a general expression is the general term which it expresses; its extension is the number of objects which the expression applies to. The intension of a singular expression is the term which it expresses; its extension is the object to which it applies."]. On the characteristics of a ,Crusade', cf. Emst-Dieter Hehl, "Was ist eigentlich ein Kreuzzug?", Historische Zeitschrift 259 (1994), pp. 297-336; see also: Jonathan Riley-Smith, s.v. "Kreuzzüge", in: Lexikon des Mittelalters, vol. 5 (Stuttgart 1999), cols. 1508-1519 ("Definition" of the term 'Crusade' cols. 1508f).

Clash

17

of Typologies

Intension

can

be depicted graphically as follows:

Archetype: Example: 'War of the Spanish against Napoleon 1808-1812'

1.

Characteristics: small contingents -

-

irregular

without fronts differentiation between combatants and non-combatants war

-

no

-

2.

Ideal type:

Example: 'Campaign of western Christians to Palestine to conquer Jerusalem 1096-

1.

Example:

1099' Characteristics:

undertaking initiated and legitimised by the pope Europe-wide undertaking religious motivation of the participants campaign as act of penance absolution as spiritual reward for a war

-

-

-

-

-

-

the war

strong and numerous contingents of troops

fighting to regain Christian areas -

Functionalisation of Types of War by 'Extension' The functionalisation, i. e., the

use

of a name

or

type in discursive contexts, can also be

interpreted more abstractly using linguistic-analytic criteria: We wish to designate the assigning of a particular name ('type') to a particular object ('phenomenon', 'occurrence', 'item') as extension in what follows.23 This means that the object fulfills at least some of the characteristics which constitute the 'type'. Applied concretely to "The extension of a term, in customary logical parlance, is simply the set of things the term is true of." The definition is taken from the classic essay by Hilary Putnam, "The Meaning of 'Meaning'", in: Language, Mind, and Knowledge, ed. Keith Gunderson, Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science (Minneapolis 1975), pp. 131-193; this extract from p. 132.

Hans-Henning Kortüm

18

the introductory quotation, this means: The 'name' ('type') 'Guerrilla War' has been extended by General Abizaid to the specific historical event 'killing of American soldiers of occupation in Iraq since April 2003, after the proclaimed end of war'. This implies the existence of the above-mentioned set of characteristics (small contingents, irregular warfare, war without precisely defined fronts, etc.24). As for our second example, 'Crusade' it means: the type 'Crusade' has been extended to a multitude of belligerent conflicts in the 12th and 13th centuries. Of course, one speaks of the 2nd, 3rd Crusades and so on. Likewise it is also an extension when conflicts of the 20th and 21st centuries are referred to as 'Crusades', for instance, when the later American president Dwight D. Eisenhower spoke of the participation of the allied forces under American leadership in the Second World War in Europe as a "Crusade in Europe"25, or when George W. Bush at first entitled his intended "war against terrorism" as a "Crusade".26 What these have in common with the 'classic' Crusades is the quasi-religious sense of mission of the initiators, the array of strong, international contingents of troops, the geographical push from 'west' to 'east' and the cultural alterity of the warring parties. -

Extension

can

-

be

depicted graphically as follows: Historical situation: 1.

Example: 'US troops in

Iraq in July, 2003'

-

Ideal

2.

type:

1. Example: 'Guerrilla War'

2. Example: 'Crusade'

Example:

'Second, Third, Fourth (etc.)

-

Extension -

(Middle 12th to beginning 13lh centuries) 'Albigensian Crusade' (1209-1229) 'Crusade in Europe' (1944-1945) Crusade'

-

Cf. above, n. 13. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Crusade in Europe, (Garden City 1948). "This crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take a while." Said by George W. Bush 16.11.2001 only five days after the Islamist terror attacks against the Pentagon and World Trade Center.

Clash

of Typologies

If both schemes

Archetype: 'War of the

Spanish against Napoleon

are

19

put together, the following diagram is the result:

Ideal

type:

Extension

'US troops in Iraq, July, 2003'

'Guerrilla War'

1808-1812'

Application on a Typology of War

Historical Situation:

-

2 Tables

clarify the

processes of intension (formation of types) and extension (the use of of in types war the discursive context), specific sets of characteristics will be applied to specific types of war (process of intension table 1) in the following section. Likewise, particular names or types will be applied to particular historical events (process of extension table 2). However, in this connection it must be emphasised that different authors apply differently structured sets of characteristics to the different types of war: Therefore there is not a generally applicable canon of type-constituting characteristics.27 The following tables in no way mean to define exactly each type of war by exhaustively precise sets of characteristics. They do not aim at the 'definitive' 'ideal' type in the Weberian sense.28 In addition it must be said that often the historical event which forms the basis of a particular type of war cannot be named with sufficient certainty. It is also not necessarily the chronologically earliest event which gives a name and constitutes a particular type of war. For instance, guerrilla tactics were not first practised between 1808 and 1812 in the Spanish-French conflict, but can be found in earlier periods such as during the Hundred Years War. The term 'Crusade' causes two further problems: firstly, as a type term, it is not contemporary; and secondly, the term 'Crusade' is now occasionally also applied to wars which took place chronologically earlier than the First Crusade (1096-1099) which was the first use for the type.29 The category 'Total War' is also not necessarily tied to the historical context of the World Wars I and II. The To

-

-

See below regarding this problem. Max Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Grundriss der verstehenden Soziologie. ed. Johannes Winckelmann, vol. 1 (Köln 1964), S. 14. Cf. Geoffrey Regan, First crusader. Byzantium's holy wars (Stroud 2001).

Studienausgabe,

20

Hans-Henning Kortüm

Suggestion

that this category

can

also be

convincing.30

applied

to

pre-modern

contexts

seems

Table 1 : Intension Choice of Characteristics

Names/Types

seizing power in a foreign territory extensive physical extermination of opponents (including non-combatants)

subcultural depopulation of extensive areas no limitation of violence no chance of de-escalating for the defenders_ seizing power in another society or extending one's own area of power to the neighbouring foreign societies intra- or transcultural, primarily carried out by professional "pugnatores" end of violence possible by capitulation (-> limitation of violence) war against non-combatants only in particular phases of the war limited destraction seizing power within one's own society subcultural all forms of violence possible, however also means of de-escalation (e.g., inter-

or

War of extermination

War of conquest / of colonisation

war

Civil War/ fratricidal war

capitulation, compromise)_

appropriation of rights of power within a society, without striving for complete power aiming for highest possible yield from the war within a society, intra- or subcultural, equally-ranked opponents

regional limits -> number of combatants tends to be fewer_ removal of an established power, or appropriation of rights of power within a society, or acquisition of complete power in a society within a society, opponents of unequal rank (e.g., peasantry

Feuds/ little war /

private war Revolt / revolution / rebellion

nobility;

rulers; nobility rulers)_

-

towns

striving for acquiring territory or rights of power personal enrichment of the combatants -

-

no

'total'

the defensive side war especially against non-combatants payment of tribute (apart from military

War of pillaging

on

intervention) the only method of

de-escalation, limiting violence_ ensuring the power of a religion/confession in a multi-confessional society can be within a society or between states, trans-national, sub- and War of religion intercultural limitation of violence by 30

capitulation, partly also by conversion_

Cf. von Trotha, "Formen" (see above, n. 15), p. 75: "Der totale Krieg ist keine Industriezeitalters" ["Total war is no invention of the industrial age"].

Erfindung

des

Clash

of Typologies

weakening of the opponents in order to strengthen one's own position by spreading fear and shock among non-combatants violence primarily against non-combatants to achieve political aims no major engagements, rather murder, acts of violence of all kinds_

War of terror

Table 2: Extension

Names/Types

War of extermination

•

Item/Historical events

(Medieval examples)

(Modern examples)

campaign against Slavic-heathen ethnics (at least in the conception of Bernard of Clairvaux) (1147) conquest of Jerusalem by western

conflicts with native Americans in 18th and 19th centuries in USA central African conflicts, e.g.. between Hutus and Tutsis

Christians

(1099)

conquest of England by the

War of conquest / war

Item/ Historical events

Normans (1066) seizure of land by western Christians in Syria/Palestine during/after First Crusade

of colonisation

(from 1097)

•

Byzantine intervention in Italy ("East Gothic war" in 6th century) Reconquista in Spain (ll,hto 15th centuries.) Normans in southern Italy/Sicily

(lllh century)_

confrontation between 'Burgundy' and 'Armagnac' parties in France (first third of the 15th century) conflicts within the Merovingian

Civil war / fratricidal war

Feuds / little war /

•

royal family (7lh/8th centuries) Welfen-Staufer struggle for the throne (late 12'h/early 13"1 century) Babenberg-Conradine Confrontation (10th century)

small noble feuds (also in the orient at the time of the crusades, 12lh/13,h centuries) condottieri in Italy

private war

•

(14lh/15'h centuries)_

(20th century)_

imperialistic policies of the European powers (19th/20th centuries) conflicts between European

settlers and native Americans

(17th to 19th centuries)

Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) American Civil War

(1861-1865)

warlords in 'denationalized' territories (e.g., Somalia 1993) warlords in Afghanistan

Hans-Henning Kortüm

22

Revolt / revolution / rebellion

Lusatian revolution (983) confrontation between the Lombardy cities and Frederick Barbarossa (2nd half 12th century) opposition of nobility to Henry IV

decolonialisation

chevauchées of the English in France during the Hundred Years War (1350s and 1360s) Viking raids (8th to 10th centuries) Hungarian invasions of central

marauding mercenaries in Thirty Years War (-» warlords) (1618-1648) piracy of European sea powers in 17th 718th centuries

(from 1075)_

War of pillaging

•

Europe (10lh century)

(20lh century)

Russian Revolution 1917 Chinese Revolution 1912

Arab pirates in western Mediterranean (8lh to 10th

centuries)_ War of religion

Reconquista in Spain (11th to 15th centuries)

Thirty Years War (1618-1648)

(end 11th to 14th centuries) North French nobility's fight against the occitan Albigensians (1209-1229) Muslim Expansion

fundamentalists (since second half of

political murders by the Assassins (esp. 12th century) chevauchées of the English in

terror

terror of Islamic

crusades

(622-17'" century)_

War of terror

France in the Hundred Years

war

20th century)

of Islamic fundamentalists (since second half of

20th century)

Bosnian war central African Civil Wars

(1350s and 1360s)

Conclusions and Problems exception of the thermo-nuclear war of extermination, there is a typological medieval and modem wars. For there are no sufficiently different between identity sets of characteristics which would allow a claim for a categorical difference between medieval and modem wars. 2. There is not a clearly defined number of characteristics which constitute an ideal type. Intension that is, the derivation of constitutive characteristics from an archetype and their ascription to an ideal type is not normally applied by everyone in the same way. From one historical archetype different people could derive different characteristics. Thus different people could understand something different by one and the same ideal type, although the historical starting point in each case is the same. Everyone, even every historian, will, when speaking of 'Guerrilla War', 1. With the

-

-

Clash

3.

23

of Typologies

develop a quite specific definitory understanding of this type of war, without always exposing the criteria. Every war whether in the past or current can be described by a plurality of types of war (categories). So, for example, looked at from different perspectives, the Spanish-French conflict (1808-1812) was at the same time a 'Guerrilla War', a -

-

'defensive war', a 'war of liberation', a 'war of terror' and a 'national war'. Consequently for each historical or contemporary war, there are always several competing ascriptions of types of war. 4. Wars are very complex historical phenomena. Typological classifications, however, mostly describe only certain stages or phases of a war. Historical events are not explicit in their typological aspects; rather, they are ambiguous. Thus, each individual event can be extended to different categories. For example, the historical event the 'Hundred Years War' ('belligerent conflicts between England and France, 1337 1453') can be extended, depending on the particular phase as a 'war of expansion or conquest', as 'war of pillaging, damage, or devastation', as an 'epochal war', as a 'war about inheritance', as a 'defensive war', or as a 'state- or nationforming war'. 5. Which typological classification ultimately gains the upper hand is a question of the sovereignty of interpretation (in society). The end of the Second World War has been and still is evaluated differently by various groups in society: either negatively, as setting the seal on the German defeat; or positively, as the liberation from Hitler's dictatorship. The latter has gained acceptance, not least because of the authoritatively effective interpretation of the most senior representative of the state, the Federal President Richard von Weizsäcker, in his famous speech in 1995. -

How Can We Solve these Problems? Suggestions for a New Conceptualisation an illusory hope to wish to be able to replace traditional terms which deep-seated in the public consciousness with new ones. But, for academic discourse a desirable conceptual focus ought to be achievable. If historians continue to use the typological terms which have been used up to now, then at least they ought to clarify precisely which characteristics, in their opinion, constitute each type. For only then can

It appears to be are

the desired academic discourse occur. One other possible route would be to take our leave from the traditional conceptualisations and assume instead different descriptive categories. The categories suggested here are five binarily-structured pairs of opposites. Of these, at least one the pair of terms 'symmetrical asymmetrical' is already well-established in

-

-

-

Hans-Henning Kortüm

24

sociological discussion and serves there to describe conflicts.31 The following five pairs of terms are suggested: public symmetrical regular limited transcultural

private asymmetrical irregular total intracultural

Naturally such a determination appears at first sight to be rather arbitrary. And it should not be claimed that these pairs are sufficient to describe wars precisely. But they do enable a characterisation of wars which is more precise than a questionable typological classification. Such classifications only make sense, however, if one states the point of view from which they are being used. The statement that a conflict or war is asymmetrical does not by itself promise an increase in knowledge. For it might be difficult to imagine a completely symmetrical war. From this point of view, every war is asymmetrical. It should always be stated where the claimed asymmetry exists: in the relative numbers of troops, in the manner of fighting, in the training, etc. A further advantage of these pairs of opposites may lie in the fact that these pairs can be graduated. In the following, as examples, two wars are selected, one from the Middle Ages and one from the Modem Era: 1. The Italian wars of Frederick Barbarossa (second half of the 12th century): these can be graduated binarily as: -

-

-

-

-

More public (participation of many imperial princes) More transcultural (more archaic feudal north-Alpine culture of war versus 'modem' upper Italian city cultures; language difference) More asymmetric (regarding the methods of engagement and the contingent structure:

city nobility versus country nobility) More irregular (particularly unusual practices of violence) More total (unusual practices of violence; long-lasting, almost permanent stay of the emperor in Italy; reduction of violence-limiting mechanisms)

2. The Israeli-Arab 'Six-Day-War' of 1967. Classified scheme, it appears as: -

-

-

31

according to the above-outlined

More public (state-organised armies on both sides) More transcultural (Israeli war culture, shaped by western/American influence versus the war culture of the Arab states taking part, which was eastern, trained and equipped by the

Soviets) Asymmetrical (regarding the efficiency of the belligerents: The Israelis were better organised, had superior weapons systems; more efficient news service)

From the wealth of literature, as well as Münkler, Kriege (see above, n. 5), pp. 11 and 48-57 the following are cited: Manfred Schmidt, Wörterbuch zur Politik (Stuttgart 1995), headword "Asymmetrie", Frank Pfetsch, Internationale Politik (Stuttgart 1994), pp. 39f.; Michael D. Burke: "Doctrine for asymmetric warfare", Military Review Juli/August (2003), pp. 18-25. ,

Clash

-

25

of Typologies More regular (no violence against non-combatants) Limited belligerence (only attacks against military targets; time-limited:

'Blitzkrieg')

-

Thus

one can

talk of more

irregular and

less

regular, of more limited

or more

'total'

wars.

advantage of these pairs of terms is that they enable a comparison of independent of epoch. In contrast to many usual typological classifications, the

The decisive wars

of terms are not connected to specific epochs. The problems described above which are connected to the types of war used up to now, can be avoided to a great extent. Apart from this, it seems to be the case that modern military academic approaches are increasingly inclined to use such attributions as represented by the pairs of opposites listed above. For instance an increased use of the attribute 'private' can be noticed. One can speak of the privatisation of war, private war entrepreneurs, private

pairs

business, private security firms.32 In the present volume, such a pair of opposites is singled out. In this case, the aim is

war

put the value of the pair of terms transcultural and intracultural to the test. This pair of terms appears to be so meaningful because it links war and culture. John Keegan has pointed out the close connection between war and culture impressively; he has had a formative influence on the term "war cultures".33 The subsequent contribution from Stephen Morillo offers a use of the pair of opposites 'transcultural' 'intracultural'.34 Using this pair of opposites Morillo can explain, for example, why transcultural wars tend to use greater cruelty. An explanation can be found in the fact that in transcultural wars, norms are either not present or are abolished. Morillo differentiates transcultural wars at another level in order to understand this process: transcultural wars exist in two forms, according to him. The first is intercultural war, where the opponents meet as members of different cultures, as, for instance, in the Crusades or in the Vietnam War. Secondly, there is the form of subcultural war, where, within the framework of a 'major culture', two 'sub-cultures' fight for the social power of interpretation, such as in the case of the Thirty Years War, where Catholics fought against Protestants, or in many so-called 'Civil Wars', such as in Afghanistan and Rwanda, but also in the American Civil War (1861-1865). to

-

Cf. Förster, "Die neuen Kriege" (cf. above, n. 6), pp. 9-10. John Keegan, A Histoiy of Warfare (London 1993), see for example pp. 24-46 and pp. 84-94. Cf. below Morillo in this volume.

Hans-Henning Kortüm

26

Consequently we have the following scheme: Wars

Intracultural Wars (Wars within a culture)

Transcultural Wars (Wars between two different cultures)

Intercultural Wars

Hundred Years War

Crusades

(between England and France, 1337-1453)

(crusaders against Muslims, 11* to 13th Centuries)

Franco-Prussian War

(1870/1871)

Iraq War (Western Coalition against Iraq, 2003)

Subcultural Wars

Albigensian Crusade

(1209-1229) Civil Wars

(in Rwanda: HutuTutsi (1994),

American Civil War

(1861-1865))

IL General

Typology of Transcultural Wars

Stephen Morillo

Typology of Transcultural Wars The Early Middle Ages and Beyond

A General

-

Introduction This article attempts to develop a general typology of transcultural wars in as broad and theoretical way as possible. My examples will be drawn primarily from early medieval European warfare (up to c. 1200, and sometimes from beyond Europe in this chronological era), but as the references to other articles in this collection will try to show, I aim at a general typology that transcends this chronological limit.1

Terms and Concepts Constructing a typology of transcultural warfare requires first that we have some working notion of what we mean by culture and how cultural boundaries can affect the conduct of war. This is of course not an easy first step, given the multiple vectors along which personal identity can be and historically has been constructed, and may be more problematic for the early middle ages, an era long before nationalism in its various guises appeared to dominate the stage of (international) identity formation. If we are strict enough about what counts as a unitary culture, all wars will count as transcultural, which would make a typology of them pointless. Pragmatically, we can probably make a distinction between Big Cultures on the one hand and Subcultures, component segments of Big Cultures, on the other. The former consist of broad areas sharing major cultural features ranging from basic ecological and subsistence patterns and material culture to broadly shared aspects of world view -

Hans-Henning Kortüm and the other organizers of the "Transcultural Wars from the Middle Ages to the 21st Century" conference at the University of Regensburg in MarchApril 2004 for inviting me to participate, and to thank them and the other participants at the conference for stimulating discussions that have informed revisions of my article. i would like to thank

Stephen Morillo

30

religion, philosophy, perhaps even cultures of war. The latter will share some (perhaps many or most) of these features with other subcultures of the same Big Culture but differ from them in a few respects that (at least in some contexts) appear crucial to the

members of the different subcultures.2 Subcultures may themselves be made up of their own subcultures, and the boundaries between subcultures cannot be conceived of as fixed. Rather, subcultures must be seen as malleable socio-cultural constructions whose boundaries shift constantly in response to political, ecological, and other circumstances, sometimes through slow processes of identity formation across large parts of the local population, but sometimes in response to active construction of local cultural identities by community leaders or would-be leaders. Big Cultures were undoubtedly less subject to conscious manipulation due to their scope; still, they too should be seen not as "natural" entities but as the sum across time and space of local culture formations interacting in ways that tended towards convergent acculturation. Transcultural is therefore a term that refers to processes that cross these constructed cultural boundaries, whether between Big Cultures or between sub-cultures; transcultural processes may thus be contrasted with intracultural processes that do not cross such boundaries. Given the multiplicity and shifting nature of such boundaries, transcultural processes can occur in many ways at many levels of cultural difference. One of those ways, of course, was war. But defining transcultural war as war that crossed cultural boundaries may be too simple. Our definition of transcultural warfare should account not just for war crossing cultural boundaries, but to the perception of such crossings by the participants themselves and the effect of these perceptions on warfare. Let me thus suggest a definition of transcultural war as war in which perceptions of cultural difference influenced the conduct of war, altering it significantly from the patterns of intra-cultural war. This definition depends crucially on the notions of cultural identity expressed by the participants, whether in actions or words. It also implies that not all cultural differences will matter in generating transcultural warfare. Two societies might have different cultures in many respects, including language, ethnicity, and so forth, but if they share a common diplomatic and military culture, warfare between them will likely not be transcultural.

2

This rough-and-ready definition of culture and cultural boundaries may be definitions and references cited by Bernhard Kroener in this volume, below.

supplemented with the

A General

A

Typology of Transcultural Wars

-

The Early Middle Ages and Beyond

31

Typology of Wars and Cultures

this definition with our discussion of cultures suggests that there are two types of transcultural wars, in addition to the "base" category of intra-cultural wars. First, what I will call intercultural wars: wars between Big Cultures. Second, what I will call subcultural wars: wars between sub-cultures of the same Big Culture (or indeed between subcultures of the same larger subculture). I will discuss both of these types, as well as intracultural warfare as a baseline of comparison, in terms of four sets of characteristics: the relationship between opposing forces in each type; the geopolitical settings within which each type tended to occur; the conventions of conflict (or lack thereof) that appear in each; and the diachronic trend in terms of cultural interaction that each type of warfare leads to.

Combining

Intracultural warfare In 1119, King Henry I of England, with 500 milites, fought King Louis VI of France, with 400 milites, at Brémule. Henry won, securing the Norman frontier and capturing many French knights in the process. Only three soldiers died in the battle, for as Orderic Vitalis explains, the strength of their helmets protected them (indeed, Henry took a blow to the head that his helmet deflected) and "they spared each other on both sides out of fear of God and fellowship in arms".3 Not to mention that it was more profitable to ransom captured foes than to kill them. Here we have a fine example of intracultural warfare. It is characterized by mutual comprehension, however hostile relations might be in the course of the war. Henry and Louis understood each other, understood what each was after by going to war, and understood that the other also understood. Though they could be considered as coming from different subcultures of northwest European culture Normans, especially AngloNormans, were happy to distinguish themselves as a gens separate from the French when it suited their in military terms they shared a culture. In other words, sub-cultures might engage in intra-cultural warfare if the cultural characteristics distinguishing them did not affect their conduct of war with each other. Brémule also serves to illustrate one of the sorts of setting in which intracultural warfare took place: systems of polities that inhabited a common diplomatic and military cultural space. Warfare within closed cultural systems, even without separate polities, -

purposes4

3

4

-

Orderic Vitalis, The Ecclesiastical History, ed. and trans. Marjorie Chibnall, 6 vols. (Oxford, 1978), vol. 6: pp. 234-42, quote at p. 241. See, e.g., Emily Albu, The Normans in their Histories: Propaganda, Myth and Subversion (Woodbridge, 2001); Graham A. Loud, "Gens Normannorum: myth or reality", Anglo-Norman Stages 4 (1981), pp. 104-16.

Stephen Morille*

32

and elite-driven civil warfare within a closed polity whose ultimate legitimacy is accepted by the factions involved also generate intracultural warfare.5 Such warfare, as at Brémule, is marked by accepted conventions of conflict, conventions that can generate greater or lesser degrees of ritual associated with or as part of combat.6 Tactics, too, are conventional, with weapons and soldier types closely associated with, indeed symbolic of, the military culture the combatants share.7 Accepted conventions extend to constructions of bravery and cowardice, shaping the behavior of combatants before, during and after battle.8 The conventions also cover the treatment of prisoners and non-combatants, as with the ransoming that motivated knights to capture rather than kill their opponents at Brémule. Conventional treatment does not necessarily mean good treatment, of course: the conventional treatment of peasants by elite warriors was everywhere brutal,9 and the convention among twelfth century Japanese elite warriors was not capture and ransom of each other but slaughter of prisoners (or suicide before capture, a practice virtually unknown in medieval Europe) followed by the hunting down and killing of all surviving family members.10 The latter included women, and treatment of female non-combatants is also both subject

5

6

7

8

9

10

I discuss such conditions and their impact on strategy in Stephen Morillo, "Battle Seeking: The Contexts and Limits of Vegetian Strategy", Journal of Medieval Military History 1 (2002), pp. 21-

41. David Bachrach, Religion and the Conduct of War c.300-1215 (Woodbridge, 2003), esp. Ch. 3, analyzes some of these rites and rituals. The sword as the symbol of knightly prowess (sometimes named, as in "Excalibur") is an obvious example of this phenomenon in Europe; in Japan, the bushi way of life was known as "The Way of the Bow and Arrow" until the cult of the sword came to dominate in the Tokugawa period: G. Cameron Hurst III, Armed Martial Arts of Japan: Swordsmanship and Archery (New Haven,

1998), p. 103. analyze constructions

of cowardice in medieval combat in Stephen Morillo, "Expecting Cowardice: Medieval Battle Tactics Reconsidered", Journal of Medieval Military History 4 I

(forthcoming).

See Matthew Strickland in this volume, below. This "conventional" treatment of peasants (and, indeed, merchants) in medieval Europe and in other societies dominated by warrior elites from another perspective reflects the cultural divide separating elites from subject populations in traditional societies, making "conflict" (often very one-sided) between these two groups a form of subcultural warfare (see below). The modem corollary of this might be the divide between the professional soldiers of modem industrial states and their civilian populations; as Hew Strachan points out in this volume, below, modem armies (perhaps from as early as the late 18th century) shared a culture of war that gave their formal wars an intracultural character even when the broader cultures were different (Sepoy armies in late 18th century India were part of this culture, for example), but that made subcultural wars out of conflicts between soldiers and civilians, as in the Iberian resistance to Napoleon. Stephen Morillo, "Cultures of Death: Warrior Suicide in Europe and Japan", The Medieval History Journal 4, 2 (2001), pp. 241-257.

A General

Typology of Transcultural Wars

to conventional constructions and

-

The Early Middle Ages and Beyond

limitations, but, like the

33

treatment of peasants, often

even in intracultural warfare.1 Finally, intracultural warfare is marked by outcomes mediated as much or more by diplomacy as by the results of campaigns and combat. Or, as when elite civil war produced a decisive winner, the victory still has to be legitimized in some way by the larger culture within which the war had taken place. The diachronic trend of intracultural warfare, therefore, especially in the absence of "shocks" to the system from outside, is to enact and so reinforce the cultural norms governing warfare and the broader culture. A second possible outcome of prolonged intracultural war, however, especially in cases of indecisive civil war or polarization of a previously multi-polar cultural-political system, is the heightening of conflict to subcultural levels, as defined below; the drawing of subcultural boundaries that accompany such shifts often seems, from a perspective outside the cultural system, arbitrary or overblown. 12

brutal

'

Intracultural warfare can thus transform over time into one variant of transcultural warfare. Both types of transcultural warfare differ from intracultural warfare and from each other in each of the four characteristics already noted: relationship of the opponents, geo-political and cultural setting, conventions of conflict and treatment of non-combatants, and the diachronic cultural-political trend such warfare tended to

produce. Intercultural warfare 1241, Mongol armies approached the gates of Venice and Vienna, having already conquered Russia and defeated armies of Poles and Hungarians. Western European leaders were in a panic, not knowing what to make of this new and unexpected menace.13 Though western Europe was spared from further warfare with the Mongols by the death of the Great Khan, it had glimpsed the unsettling experience of intercultural war, or war across the boundaries separating Big Cultures. The pastoralist In

Gender, like class, constituted another potential cultural divide that could split what might casually look like a unitary culture, while gender roles and expectations of women also often marked divisions between Big Cultures. The treatment of women as non-combatants can therefore be another marker of the character of different wars: see the contributions to this volume by Corinne Saunders and Birgit Beck below, and more generally Joshua Goldstein, War and Gender 12

1

(Cambridge, 2001). Examples of this could include the breakdown of the classical Greek conventions of limited phalanx warfare in the run-up to the Peloponnesian War (on which see Victor Davis Hanson, The Western Way of War (New York, 1989), or the mutual demonization through propaganda of the opponents in World War I, who arguably entered the war expecting a short, intracultural conflict, but found themselves in a life or death struggle requiring the mobilization of emotional resources in the population available only against subcultural enemies. John J. Saunders, The Mongol Conquests (Philadelphia, 2001) offers a good narrative of this episode.

34

Stephen Morillo

nomads of central Asia differed from western Europeans in their basic mode of subsistence, their social organization, and in nearly every aspect of their cultural practices and world view, including their styles and ethos of war.14 The result typified intercultural warfare in being characterized by mutual incomprehension (or at least semi-mutual incomprehension, for the Mongols were masters of intelligence and knew more about sedentary civilizations in general and western Europe in particular than their victims knew of them). In other words, one or both sides fundamentally misunderstand each other in basic ways, failing to comprehend the goals, motivations and methods of their enemy. The opponents in intercultural warfare therefore often think themselves engaged in warfare with non-humans, variously conceived of as savage sub-human barbarians or beings capable of superhuman feats indeed sometimes both at the same

time.15

-

Intercultural warfare thus lacks any mutually accepted conventions of conflict or ritual element. When the Mongols invaded Japan in 1274, the Kamakura bushi opened their attack on the Mongol landing force with their usual ritual name announcing and the firing of a single whistling arrow. The display merely sent the disciplined Mongol troopers into gales of laughter.16 Instead, intercultural warfare usually witnessed the clash of very different tactical systems and strategic expectations. One Mongol advantage in Russia was their ability, unexpected and in violation of all Russian expectation, to campaign in winter, which actually increased their mobility by allowing them to cross frozen rivers. Sometimes such systemic disparities produce a disproportionate advantage for one side, as for the Mongols in Russia, or as with the German advantage on their own eastern frontier against the Slavs in the tenth and eleventh centuries, an advantage that resulted as much from more complex political organization as from strictly military

15

See, among others, Rene Grousset, Empire of the Steppes: A History of Central Asia (Rutgers, 1997), David Morgan, The Mongols (Cambridge, 1990). See also the comments by Andrew Ayton in this volume, below.

Typical

of this reaction is Ammianus Marcellinus'

description

of the Huns:

"They

all have

compact, strong limbs and thick necks, and are so monstrously ugly and misshapen, that one might take them for two-legged beasts or for the stumps, rough-hewn into images, that are used in putting

16

sides to bridges. But although they have the form of men, however ugly, they are so hardy in their mode of life that they have no need of fire nor of savory food, but eat the roots of wild plants and the half-raw flesh of any kind of animal whatever, which they put between their thighs and the backs of their horses, and thus warm it a little..." Ammianus Marcellinus, Res Gestae 31.2 (available at http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/ammianus/31.shtml); trans. Michael Pavkovic and Stephen Morillo. Stephen Turnbull, The Samurai: A Military History (New York, 1977), p. 83; Morris Rossabi, Khubilai Khan (Berkeley, 1988), p. 102, also stresses the unfamiliarity of Mongol tactics to the

Japanese.

A General

Typology ofTranscultural Wars

The Early Middle Ages and Beyond

35

-

asymmetries.17 But often such disparities simply produce problems for both sides. The

First Crusade saw Turks and Franks alike, the former like the Mongols a version of central Asian nomadic horse archers, struggle to adapt their own styles of warfare to their foes' strengths and weaknesses.18 Lack of convention and comprehension play havoc with expectations of bravery and cowardice in intercultural warfare. In the First Crusade, for example, Frankish conventions of bravery, especially their eagerness for face-to-face combat, appeared rash, foolhardy, but at times unbelievably intimidating to Turks and Byzantines alike Anna Comnena remarks on the charge of their heavy cavalry that "a mounted Kelt is irresistible; he would bore his way through the walls of Conversely, both retreats craftiness and the Turkish of struck the Franks use Byzantine strategic feigned it the of Turkish cowardice the Franks that was as cowardly, though by very expectation made Turkish feigned retreats effective.20 In general, intercultural warfare seems to produce heightened fears of enemy bravery, balanced by heightened contempt and expectations of cowardice if the fears proved unfounded; more generally, it produces uncertainty concerning the incomprehensible Other that leads to wider variations of battlefield behavior both brave and cowardly than in intracultural war. Uncertainty and incomprehension also undermine conventions for the treatment of prisoners and non-combatants in intercultural war. Sometimes, the stresses of battlefield uncertainty found an outlet in excessive brutality towards non-combatants: the bloody sack of Jerusalem by the Crusaders in 1099 comes to mind in this context.21 Similarly brutal but far more calculated was the use of tenor tactics the slaughtering of entire urban populations or villages to discourage future resistance a technique abundantly attested for the Mongols, but also deployed occasionally by western Europeans on their pagan frontiers. But such brutality is not the rule; rather, expedience and pragmatism produce a wide range of policies towards non-combatants and prisoners. The Mongols, again, were happy to employ members of conquered populations with special skills, -

Babylon."19

-

-

17

18

19

20

21

Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe (Princeton, 1993), has a good analysis of the processes shaping this frontier, though see the remarks on the military aspect of Bartlett's general thesis by

Michael Prestwich in this volume, below. Raymond C. Smail, Crusading Warfare, 1097-1193 (Cambridge, 1956); John France, Victory in the East: A Military History of the First Crusade (Cambridge, 1994). Anna Comnena, The Alexlad, trans. Edgar R.A. Sewter (New York, 1969), p. 416; on Frankish rashness see pp. 308, 313, and passim. See e.g. Fulcher of Chartres' description of the siege and battle of Nicaea in Edward Peters, ed., The First Crusade: The Chronicle of Fulcher of Chartres and other Source Materials, The Middle Ages Series, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia, 1998), pp. 63-67; Morillo, "Expecting Cowardice" (see above, n.

8).

Peters, First Crusade (see above,

n. 20), p. 91. See also the extended comments on treatment of non-combatants in the crusades by Matthew Strickland below, and the analysis of images of the enemy in the crusades by Hannes Möhring in this volume, below.

36

Stephen Morillo

whether Chinese military engineers in Persia or Persian bureaucrats in China, as suited their purposes. One reason for this pragmatism is that the diachronic trend of intercultural warfare is to produce mutual acculturation, thus transforming regular intercultural warfare into either intra- or subcultural warfare (and perhaps replacing war with less violent forms of cultural interaction). Crusading warfare became steadily less intercultural over time: witness the emergence of a Frankish image of Saladin as a chivalrous warrior, an imposition of values that speaks to growing, if not completely accurate, mutual comprehension. Or note the transformation of pagan north-men into Normans22 and the transformation of originally nomadic Magyars into Hungarians an example pregnant with irony for the Hungarian loss to the Mongols in 1240.23 Such acculturation was often the result of conscious efforts, including religious conversion, marriage alliances, and the broader spectrum of economic and intellectual exchanges that developed along many frontiers.24 On the other hand, conscious efforts at acculturating a defeated intercultural foe can produce conscious resistance, with the defeated constructing a subcultural identity (sometimes through warfare) against the conquerors' imposition of intracultural unity. The history of Norman conquests in Wales and Ireland may be read in this light.25 -

Subcultural warfare

brings us to my second type of transcultural warfare, war between subcultures of a larger subculture or Big Culture. This type of warfare features neither mutual comprehension nor incomprehension, but mutual anti-comprehension: that is, the willful construction of an understood foe as an incarnation of evil, or more practically as maliciously motivated underminers of order, whether socio-political, cosmic, or both. This

sources in note 2, as well as David Bates, Normandy before 1066 (London, 1982) and Eleanor Searle, Predatory Kinship and the Creation of Norman Power (Berkeley, 1988). Note also Alfred the Great's conversion-based diplomacy with the Vikings: Richard Abels, "Peace Making with

See

Vikings: the Anglo-Saxon Experience", in War and Peace in Ancient and Medieval History, eds. Philip DeSouza and John France (Cambridge, forthcoming) and more generally Richard Abels, Alfred the Great. War, Kingship and Culture in Anglo-Saxon England (London, 1998).

Discussed further by Ayton, below. Compare Anglo-Welsh relations along the Welsh border, as detailed in Frederick C. Suppe, Militaiy Institutions on the Welsh Marches: Shropshire, A.D. 1066-1300, Studies in Celtic History 14 (Woodbridge, 1994) with Chinese relations with their various steppe-nomadic neighbors: Thomas Barfield, The Perilous Frontier. Nomadic Empires and China (Oxford, 1992). John Gillingham and Ralph A. Griffiths, Medieval Britain: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2002); Strickland, below. Much of the history of colonialism generally, especially the deployment of nationalism by colonized peoples against its European inventors in the 20lh century, also

illustrates this process; see Strachan in this volume, below, who notes that "the two world wars of the twentieth century broke down the distinction between Europe and the rest of the world."

A General

Typology of Transcultural Wars

-

The Early Middle Ages and Beyond

37

Thus, unlike intercultural foes who are seen as non-humans, subcultural foes are seen as devils or fallen humans in league with devils. Note the difference in attitude medieval defenders of orthodox Catholicism displayed towards heathens versus heretics. The hope was to convert the former, defeating them first in battle if necessary, but not in order to exterminate them, only to convince them of the error of their ways. The latter, having rejected a Truth already known to them, were the greater threat, and the hope was to exterminate them.26 The setting for this type of warfare is thus conflict that crosses intra-cultural fault lines. Not all such fault lines and the political, social or cultural disputes and conflicts that crossed them produce subcultural warfare. Rather, the fault lines crossed have to be fairly fundamental ones to the self-identity of the larger culture, particularly to its elite constructors class, religion, and ethnicity being the most common such that the dominant construction of the culture against alternate visions becomes a protecting military necessity. In effect, a challenge from within a culture to established order has to rise to a level of threat worthy of an armed response to produce subcultural warfare.27 This also assumes that the purveyors of the alternate construction are capable of armed defense of their position. Societies such as those of medieval Europe, in which the state possesses nothing even approaching a monopoly on the legitimate use of force, are probably more likely to see outbreaks of true warfare of the subcultural variety than are societies in which the state monopolizes the means of violence. In state dominated societies, subcultural conflicts are more likely to be either supressed28 or channeled into more legalistic and peaceful methods of dispute resolution.29 This highlights the fact

worse:

they

are

-

26

27

28

29

-

Another way of seeing the distinction between intercultural and subcultural wars, contra Kroener (in this volume, below), who emphasizes a one-sided view of inclusion in a legal system as a marker of all transcultural wars, is that if an enemy breaks rules that he should know, he's a subcultural enemy; if he breaks rules he has no way of knowing, he's an intercultural enemy. Ayton (in this volume, below) presents a nuanced analysis of the fluidity of cultural boundaries and their impact on the conduct of warfare in the Balkans. His fascinating application of network theory to the structure of medieval societies and the primary groups of the armies they raised illuminates some of the possible mechanisms by which questions of individual and small group cultural identity were transmitted to larger structures, military, social and political. I would suggest that "primary groups", the basic units of armies in all ages, may be either "natural" (arising organically from the social connections of the society raising armed force) or "artificial" (created within the specialized culture of a professional armed force), and that analysis of the differences between these types could yield fruitful insights into cultures of war and the multivalent connection between intracultural, intercultural and subcultural warfare; I will be making a first pass at such an analysis in an article forthcoming in a festschrift for Bernard Bachrach. As they tended to be for example in Imperial China, except during periods of Imperial breakdown, or in the USSR and the Warsaw Pact countries before 1989; the removal of the restraining power of a dominant state in the latter case allowed the re-emergence in the Balkans of subcultural conflicts dating back to Ottoman times and before (as per Ayton). Modern democracy is the prevalent example of such a mechanism, and democratic processes are most challenged when intense cultural disputes that might once have been settled by (or at least disputed via) warfare seem unsatisfactorily resolvable at the ballot box to one side or both. The

Stephen Morillo

38

that much subcultural war occurs in the context of politically divided but culturally unified geo-political systems in which there is no mechanism for dispute resolution backed by a central authority capable of imposing its decisions by force, leaving warfare as the disputants' only option. Rather than obviating conventions of conflict as intercultural warfare does, subcultural warfare tends to heighten them, as both sides compete in symbolic terms for the legitimacy and cosmic reinforcement such conventions convey. This was especially true when internecine religious divides provoked conflict. Thus, for example, the presence of papal representatives and the increased resort to pre-battle prayers and masses by Simon de Montfort's forces during the Albigensian Crusade.31 At other times, however, conflict across classes could throw into hard relief the hidden limitations, often class-based, of intracultural conventions of conflict. The Battle of Bouvines in 1214 resembles in many of its parts a larger version of Brémule a century earlier, for example: knights fought each other seriously, but with room for surrenders, captures, and an eye to later ransoms. But in the later stages of the battle, when the French chivalry surrounded the allied mercenary infantry, mostly of common (nonknightly), non-French and urban origin, no quarter was given or asked and the slaughter was extensive.32 Certainly practicality influenced this outcome a bit, as such soldiers could not be profitably ransomed. But class (as well as ethnic) hostility played a larger role, as is shown nearly a century later still at Courtrai in 1302, where this time it was the Flemish urban infantry unexpectedly slaughtering very ransomable French noble cavalry and keeping their golden spurs as trophies, giving the battle its alternate name. The spurs themselves represent a conspicuous display of nobility in the face of a revolt consisting largely of non-knightly elements.33 in the United States in the last 15 years would have been, in a decentralized and militarized society, the opening shots of a real, as opposed to a metaphoric, Culture War. I would argue that almost all warfare since 1989 has tended towards the subcultural type. No culture capable of waging war effectively is so strange as to pose an intercultural challenge (except perhaps for terrorist organizations, on which see further below), and most intracultural disputes, even international ones over trade and so forth, are channeled into non-violent mechanisms of dispute resolution. This is necessary because of the overwhelming cost of modem warfare, and possible because of a globally shared culture of legitimate political interaction mediated by organizations such as the United Nations, the World Court, GATT, and so forth. Cultural differences of course remain at other levels of interaction, but are not expressable through warfare, again with the possible exception of terrorism. Bachrach, Religion and the Conduct of War (see above, n. 6), pp. 144-48. Georges Duby, The Legend of Bouvines: War, Religion, and Culture in the Middle Ages (Berkeley, 1990), pp. 44, 48-9. See also the discussion of late medieval warfare across class lines in Prestwich, below. Kim DeVidts, "The 1302 Battle of the Golden Spurs", unpublished seminar paper, Hawaii Pacific University, 2003, who stresses the deliberate construction of a non-class-based Flemish cultural identity by the leaders of the revolt in opposition to the pan-aristocratic connections between

bombing of abortion clinics 30

31 32

33

A General

Typology of Transcultural Wars

-

The Early Middle Ages and Beyond

39

Similarly, the symbolically heightened rituals of subcultural warfare heighten conventional expectations of bravery and cowardice and tend to dichotomize them more than in intracultural warfare: one's own side is expected to fight more bravely, both because of the greater stakes involved in terms of cosmic order and because the costs of defeat are likely to be more dangerous personally, and aspersions were more likely to be cast upon the bravery of the enemy. The minor battle of Ystrad Antarron in 1116 between a Welsh raiding party and the garrison of an Anglo-Norman held castle illustrates both of these tendencies. In the event, the Anglo-Norman commander, Razo the Steward, successfully used Welsh expectations of "French" cowardice to pull off a rare

feigned retreat by infantry.34

Prisoners and non-combatants are likely to suffer more in subcultural warfare than in either intra- or intercultural warfare. Slaughter usually replaces the taking of prisoners, those taken prisoner face likely execution, and non-combatants face consistent and planned brutality because opponents tend to construct such warfare as aimed not just against enemy military forces but against the social foundations of resistance and

disorder.35

The demonization of the enemy characteristic of subcultural wars means that the long particular subcultural wars is attempts to exterminate the enemy. Extermination is almost always at least a goal, and at times becomes reality, as in the Albigensian Crusade for all practical purposes. The reason for this is clear: negotiation with the devil is difficult, while mutual acculturation is not possible across a single, centrally contested subcultural boundary as it is across the amorphous, multivalent cultural frontiers of intercultural conflict.36 Where extermination proves impossible, whether socio-economically, because of an even balance of military force, or because of term trend of

French and Flemish nobility. See also Raoul C. van Caenegem, "Guldensporenslag 1302" in Omirent 1302, eds. Paul Trio et al. (Leuven, 2002). Morillo, "Expecting Cowardice" (see above, n. 8). The Albigensian Crusade again provides a good example. The American Civil War, discussed in terms of prisoners of war by Martin van Creveld in this volume, below, conforms (sort of) to the conventions of intracultural war in this regard only if one ignores, as van Creveld does, the race factor a fairly crucial factor to ignore in this conflict, it seems to me. Perhaps research more recent than Hesseltine's article (published in 1930, hardly the high point of racial awareness in mainstream American scholarship) would have highlighted this factor more for van Creveld. See Beck-Heppner, below, on the treatment of black and Indian women during the Civil War, and Michael Hochgeschwender's analysis of images of the enemy in the Civil War in this volume, below. Frederick II Hohenstaufen's crusade in 1227-29 illustrates some of these things nicely: having grown up in Sicily, he saw war with Arabs in intracultural terms and concluded his crusade with the resumption of Christian control of Jerusalem through diplomatic agreements. The Papacy virtually disavowed this apparent triumph because of its view of Muslims and more especially the excommunicated Frederick as subcultural demons, the former of whom were thus disqualified from being negotiated with, the latter disqualified as a competent Christian negotiator: Edward Peters, ed., Christian Society and the Crusades 1198-1229 (Philadelphia, 1971), pp. 146-171. -

40

Stephen Morillo

outside intervention limiting conflict or imposing a settlement, two outcomes dominate: either long-term, low-level, but seemingly irresolvable conflict, as for centuries in English-controlled Ireland, or, where the costs of continued conflict prove too high for both sides to sustain, eventual accommodation essentially a tacit agreement to the of the cultural downgrade importance boundary at stake, allowing the reemergence of negotiated settlements and intracultural warfare. The end of the Wars of Religion in the 17th century is an excellent example of this sort of outcome.37 The previous discussion developing a general typology of transcultural warfare can be summarized in a short table, as follows. -

Intracultural warfare

Relationship of opponents_

Setting

Conventions of conflict, ritual

comprehension

a

Warfare within culture

Normally present; Stability, or reinforcement of agreed or assumed cultural identity;

Mutual

limitations on conflict and treatment of noncombatants

Intercultural warfare

Subcultural warfare

(Semi)mutual incomprehension

Mutual anti-

comprehension (demonization)

Cultural trend

sometimes

escalating to subcultural

war

Warfare between Big Cultures

None; pragmatic

Warfare between subcultures of a Big Culture or larger subculture

Heightened ritual; Attempted mutual

Kroener, below, discusses the wars of Religion and the

limitations on conflict and treatment of noncombatants

Mutual

acculturation; towards intra- or subcultural conflict

few limitations on annihilation; if not conflict and possible, low level treatment of non- permanent conflict, combatants or towards accommodation and intracultural relations

state formation that accompanied them as of subcultural wars and their resolution in a wider acceptance of common legal culture, that is in the emergence of intracultural norms. But he attempts to place subcultural wars in both the intracultural and transcultural categories. I believe this represents a misunderstanding of my model (the intracultural nature of subcultural wars is implicit in the definition of a subculture) and a resulting loss of clarity. He furthermore tends to assume that intracultural and transcultural are static categories and to view cultural divides from only one side (usually the European one). But in fact the emphasis here is on the dynamic, constructed and mutual nature of cultural boundaries, and therefore of the fluidity and malleability of the types of warfare outlined in this model.

examples

A General

Typology ofTranscultural Wars

-

The Early Middle Ages and Beyond

41

The thesis of this article is that all wars, not just early medieval European ones, can be fit into this schema,38 especially given that the boundaries between types were of course not hard and fast but were constantly undergoing a process of contested construction, and that diachronic trends connected each type of warfare to the others. Supporting this thesis in more detail is beyond the scope of this article, but the other articles in this collection explore at least some of the implications of this model further and provide evidence and case studies by against which to measure its accuracy.

Conclusions Having outlined two types of transcultural warfare,

intercultural and subcultural, I will conclude with several further remarks based on this typology. The first has to do with a larger diachronic trend in medieval European warfare. It seems to me that one of the boundary markers between the early and the later middle ages was a shift in terms of European transcultural warfare from a greater preponderance of intercultural warfare carried on around the frontiers of western Europe to a greater preponderance of subcultural warfare carried on within the boundaries of Christian I think some could be for adduced this shift, but I will avoid enumerating them fairly clear reasons by putting the topic outside the bounds of this article. The second is that if this typology has any merit, in particular if the characteristics associated with different types of transcultural warfare reflect reality with at least some accuracy, then this model provides historians a potential route backwards from the observable patterns of war to the underlying dynamics of cultural formation that conventional sources do not often address. That is, we may be able to see the emergence of new cultural boundaries or the transformation of old ones by their effects on patterns of warfare, for the interconnections between war and culture, in early medieval Europe and elsewhere, are always close. Finally, it is again a central tenet of this analysis that the cultural boundaries that define transcultural conflict are under a constant process of contested construction. One implication of this is that the transitions from one sort of warfare to the next are not deterministic, but leave options open to policy makers. Given that the various types of warfare outlined here tend towards different levels of restraint and negotiability, with subcultural warfare occupying the most brutal and irresolvable position, intracultural

Europe.39

Cf. the schema proposed by Daniel Höhrath in this volume, below: his first two categories would generally fall under my intercultural rubric (though see Ayton on the complexities of the Ottoman frontier), while his second two categories are examples of subcultural conflict; his fifth category is so broad as to encompass wars that fit into all three types in my model. Wars against heresy and conflicts that crossed class lines, as at Courtrai, formed the bulk of these subcultural conflicts. A background of constant intracultural warfare is assumed.

42

Stephen Morillo

warfare the least brutal and most resolvable, and intercultural warfare somewhere in between (some intercultural wars can be just as brutal as subcultural wars, but tend to less intractably and institutionally so, as my analysis above points out), policies that encourage the mutual comprehension of intracultural conflict would seem to be preferable to those that foster the mutual anti-comprehension of subcultural conflict. The obvious example is the so-called War on Terror. The 9/11 attack was, from the perspective of most of the world, intercultural: it was certainly incomprehensible, and did not respect the conventions of war as the international community generally conceive of them. It was, however, probably sub-cultural from the perspective of the terrorists: they thought they understood the US, at least in some ways, and hated what they knew, conceiving of their attack as a blow for an Islamic, as opposed to a secular western, version of modernism. The tragedy of the Bush administration response has been to respond in subcultural kind: demonizing the enemy, emphasizing cultural divides, and so on, while widening the war. Predictions are hazardous for historians, whose stock in trade is the past, not the future. But if this model encapsulates any lessons of history, the chances for a more extended, more intractable conflict have probably been increased by this policy.

Michael Prestwich

Transcultural Warfare The Later Middle Ages

-

A heavily armoured knight, equipped with shield, lance and sword, riding out from a well-defended stone castle, in fulfilment of a vow made to his lady-love, epitomizes one concept of late medieval warfare. This figure fits a model of development which has proved very attractive to medievalists, that of core and periphery, put forward above all by Robert Bartlett. The thesis, in a simplified form, as far as military history is concerned, is that the characteristic features of medieval warfare, with well equipped mounted knights and strongly defended castles, moved outwards from the European heartland, as colonisation proceeded. 'As the military aristocracy of western Europe extended its lordship outwards in the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries, its members created not only conquest states and colonial enterprises, but also representations of themselves and their enterprises.'1 There was a European cultural coherence, expressed both in methods of fighting and in the chivalric code which provided a well-defined set of conventions governing conflict. Conflicts within the lands of the core, between opponents such as the French and English in the fourteenth century, who shared a common culture of chivalry, and accepted a well-defined set of military conventions, fit a model of intra-cultural conflict. Warfare on the expanding periphery, in contrast, was likely to take an inter-cultural form. Crusades directed against Moslems, and defensive wars fought against the Mongols can be classified as inter-cultural. So too can German expansion into the Baltic, which combined a crusading ideology with colonisation. Classification is not always easy; the wars of the English against the Welsh and the Scots, it can be argued, fit the pattern of the expansion of the core into the periphery, but became increasingly intra-cultural. A supplementary model may be suggested, which emphasizes the change and development that took place at the cultural interfaces. This can be termed the border region model. At the periphery where war was often endemic, new developments might take place. Thus in Britain the people of the Welsh and Scottish marches developed Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe (London,

1993), p. 85.

44

Michael Prestwich

particular ways of doing things. Rather than the spread of particular military techniques from the core to the peripheries being the main element of change, the decisive shifts arguably took place at the peripheries. In these terms, what was important was not so much the onward march of the culture dominated by knights and castles as the changes that occurred in border regions. These developments on the periphery could have a wider effect on the way in which wars were fought in the core regions of Europe. There are other ways in which war in the medieval period may be viewed as intercultural. It is a common feature of warfare in all periods that career soldiers have a particular culture of their own, be it that of the barrack-room or the officers' mess. This was especially so in the middle ages. The chivalric world of was confined to the upper échelons of society, initially to those who fought on horseback with sword and lance, and later to those who were members by birth of knightly or aristocratic groups. Opponents of similar high rank or status would treat each other in accordance with well-established conventions; systems of ransoming prisoners preserved honour and provided for personal gain. This chivalric behaviour, however, was not necessarily extended to those outside the circle. As a result, war between chivalric, or knightly, forces and others, such as townspeople, provides another possible model of intertheir

own

cultural conflict. Different recruitment methods suggest a further possible variant of this model. Armies formed of men serving under systems of feudal obligation, or even voluntarily, were very different from mercenary forces. The appearance of mercenaries such as the Brabançons and others from the Low Countries in the twelfth century, and the international free companies of the fourteenth, introduced a new element into war, culturally different in terms of motives and professionalism. Mercenary troops, where they were not integrated into existing forces, may therefore be seen as providing a further inter-cultural aspect to medieval warfare. There is one more model to suggest, in which the growing importance of the nation and the state in the later Middle Ages altered the character of war, which thus became increasingly international and intra-cultural. Elements of patriotism entered the culture of warfare. Modem historians sometimes take the view that the nation state did not exist before the eighteenth century, if not even later. In the twelfth century, nations were rarely coterminous with states. The chronicler Helmold, for example, referred to Flemings, Dutchmen, Saxons and Westphalians as being of different nations, though they did not come from distinct states.2 By the fourteenth century, however, England and France were both states and nations. Territorial, economic, and to a lesser extent dynastic, rivalries underlay the Anglo-French conflicts, which began with Edward I of England's war with Philip IV of France and continued with the Hundred Years War. 2

Helmoldi presbyteri Bozoviensis cronica slavorum, ed. Bernhard Schmeidler, Monumenta Germaniae Historica Scriptores rerum Germanicarum in usum scholarum vol. 32 (Hannover, 1909), p. 193.

Transcultural

Warfare

-

45

The Later Middle Ages

These wars were international and intra-cultural in character, rather than transcultural, in contrast to the conflicts between peoples of the earlier middle ages. However, this development of war between national states was far from universal. The Italian city states of the later Middle Ages were not national units, for all that they possessed powerful concepts of citizenship and intricate structures of government. The complex wars between the Italian cities, dominated by the activities of the condottieri, were wars between states, but were not national conflicts. Crusading warfare provides another obvious exception. The cultural differences that affected the ways in which men fought did not go unobserved by contemporaries. The splendidly detailed account of the capture of Lisbon during the second crusade, in the mid-twelfth century, provides a good example. The siege was conducted not by one of the main crusading armies, but by a seaborne force composed of Normans, English, Flemings and some Germans. The account, by an English author, suggests that the perceived differences between the various elements of the crusader force were almost as great as those between the crusaders and their Moslem enemies. The author noted the diversity of the Christian army, and remarked 'Who, indeed, would deny that the Scots are barbarians'. He observed that the Flemings and Germans pillaged the conquered city unmercifully, whereas the English and Normans kept their word to refrain from such activity. When it came to the Moorish inhabitants of Lisbon, however, the differences were not as evident as might be expected. The writer stressed, of course, the religious divide between Moslems and Christians, but according to his account, when they fought one side could barely be distinguished from the other, save by the weapons they used. However, one story he told pointed to a contrast in the more unpleasant conventions of warfare. A body of Normans and English attacked a Moorish force, and returned triumphantly to camp with 200 captives, and eighty heads, which they impaled on spears. Negotiations followed, in which the Moors succeeded in negotiating the return of the heads. Clearly head-hunting was not a part of the conventions of Moslem warfare, but was acceptable to the crusaders.3 Otto of Freising's account of Frederick Barbarossa's first Italian expedition provides another example of mid-twelfth century warfare. Otto was very well aware of the differences between the Germans and Italians; above all, it was the urban culture of northern Italy that came as a shock to the Germans. Otto noted the refinement of Italian speech, and the elegance of Italian manners. He was startled by the fact that men of relatively low social status, and even artisans, might aspire to knighthood. Otto's continuator, Rahewin, was anxious to stress the military superiority of the Germans, and told a story of how one of the Milanese rode out to display his skill at horsemanship, and to challenge the Germans to single combat. The count of Tyrol, 3

De pp.

Expugnatione Lyxbonensi.

The

106-7, 126-7, 140-1, and 176-7.

Conquest of Lisbon, ed. Charles

W. David

(New York, 1936),

46

Michael Prestwich

unarmed save for spear and shield, promptly unhorsed him.4 in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, German warfare was often depicted in Later, inter-cultural terms, even though in reality fighting took place within increasingly widely accepted norms of conduct. There was widespread use by chroniclers of the stereotype of the warlike German, bold and ferocious, but the message that was being conveyed, particularly by German authors, was a complex one, which carried overtones of nostalgia for a lost past.5 The French and English aristocracies in the thirteenth century were part of a common cultural world, yet there are a few hints that people thought that French and English methods of warfare were different. In explaining the fighting that took place in the rebellion of 1233 in England, Roger of Wendover referred to Richard Marshal as being 'experienced in French warfare', suggesting recognition by the English of French military superiority.6 It is possible that Roger may have been being ironic, for the particular technique that he referred to, that of grabbing a knight by the feet, hauling him off his horse, and then mounting it, was hardly a sophisticated fighting method. However, there is no doubt that in the thirteenth century there was an assumption in England that French military techniques were superior. Simon de Montfort was earl of Leicester, but his origins lay in the Ile de France. Though his achievements did not warrant it, he had an immense military reputation.7 He claimed to have introduced French methods to England, when he arrogantly declared, as he saw his enemies approaching before the battle of Evesham in 1265, 'By the arm of St James, they are advancing well. They have not learned that for themselves, but were taught it by me.'8 The wars of the English against the Welsh in the thirteenth century were seen, at least in some quarters, as the conquest of an uncivilised people. English propaganda presented the Welsh as inferior; the archbishop of Canterbury in particular castigated them for sexual immorality. Welsh law was declared to be unreasonable and contrary to the teachings of the Bible. The war was justified in cultural terms, which in practice were largely spurious, as English and Welsh practices were increasingly convergent.9 When war with the Scots began at the end of the century, English propaganda made much of the uncivilised conduct of their enemies, who allegedly slew women as they

riding a simple palfrey,

5

6

7

Ottonis et Rahewini Gesta Friderici I Imperatoris, ed. Georg Waitz, Monumenta Germaniae Historica Scriptores rerum Germanicarum in usum scholarum vol. 46 (Hannover, 1884), p. 172. Leonard E. Scales, "Germen Militiae: War and German Identity in the Later Middle Ages", Past and Present 180 (2003), pp. 41-82. The Flowers of History by Roger of Wendover, ed. Henry G. Hewlett, 3 vols., Rolls Series (London, 1886-9), p. 62. John R. Maddicott, Simon de Montfort (Cambridge, 1994), p. 109. The Chronicle of William de Rishanger of the Barons Wars, ed. James O. Halliwell (London, 1840), p. 45. Michael C. Prestwich, Edward I (London, 1988), p. 186. '

9

Transcultural

Warfare

-

The Later Middle Ages

47

lay in childbirth, and burned schoolchildren alive. In reality, however, the English and Scottish nobility shared a common heritage, and the language of southern Scotland and northern England was virtually identical. The war may have been viewed as intercultural, but the perception did not match the reality. In the fourteenth century, some attempts were made to justify war between England and France in terms which may be considered broadly cultural. The Hundred Years War had its origins in the feudal status of the English-held duchy of Gascony, in political and commercial rivalries in the Low Countries, and to a lesser extent in the dynastic claim that Edward III had to the French throne. The English argued, however, that the French aimed to extirpate the English tongue, a key element of national identity.11 In nationalistic poetry the English were depicted as heroic warriors opposed to the tricky and effeminate French.'2 Again, in no sense was the war inter-cultural in reality, but it made sense for contemporaries to try to depict it as a clash between fundamentally different nations. It was in fact a war between nascent nation states whose similarities outweighed their differences. One of the features of inter-cultural conflicts, where participants regarded their opponents as different or inferior, was that the conventions which normally governed warfare might often be abandoned. The siege of Crema in northern Italy by Frederick Barbarossa's troops in 1159 provides an example. The Germans cut off the heads of dead Italians, and juggled with them. The Italians responded by tearing German prisoners limb from limb. Both sides executed captives; the Germans tied child hostages to their siege machines, hoping in vain that this would prevent the Italians from bombarding them. No doubt both sides considered that their actions were justified, but they went far beyond the normal customs of siege warfare.13 This is an example not only of a conflict between different peoples, German and Italian, but also of one of townspeople against an army led by the landed aristocracy. The English wars against the Welsh in the thirteenth century also saw chivalric conventions frequently abandoned in favour of other, grimmer, practices. The Welsh were, among other things, headhunters. It was said that they decapitated all the English they found in towns they captured in 1258. Rather than condemning this practice as contrary to the laws and customs of war, the English adopted it with some enthusiasm. After

10

"

12

13

a

defeat of the Welsh in 1231, those who

Anglo-Scottish Relations 1965), p. 107.

were

not killed

on

the field of battle

1174-1328. Some Selected Documents, ed. E. Lionel G. Stones

(London,

Select Charters and Other Illustrations of English Constitutional History, ed. William Stubbs, 9th ed. (Oxford, 1913), p. 480; Rotuli Parliarnentorum, eds. John Strachey et al., vol. 2 (London, 1832), pp. 150, 158. See the poetry of Laurence Minot: Laurence Minot Poems, eds. Thomas Beaumont James and John Simons (Exeter, 1989), passim, and Political Poems and Songs, ed. Thomas Wright, Rolls Series (London, 1859), pp. 26-40, 91-3. Ottonis et Rahewini Gesta Friderici I Imperatoris (see above, n. 4), pp. 232-4.

Michael Prestwich

48

taken prisoner and then decapitated. Edward I decorated the Tower of London with the head of his main Welsh opponent, Llywelyn ap Gruffudd. The customs for ransoming prisoners were not applied during the years of Edward's conquest of Wales. For Edward I, the Welsh were rebels, to be treated as traitors. Those that were not executed were imprisoned. In the early stages of the Scottish Wars of Independence, the English showed few inhibitions in abandoning chivalric conventions. There was some legal justification for this; Edward I could argue that the Scots were rebels against his authority, and that in such a case he was entitled to act as he chose. Executions of leading Scots by hanging, drawing and quartering showed that he was very ready to use terror as a weapon of war. This was perhaps not surprising, but it was remarkable that he stepped outside the normal bounds of conduct with his treatment of Robert Bruce's sister Mary and of the countess of Buchan. After their capture in 1306, he ordered their imprisonment in cages open to public view, mounted on the ramparts of the castles of Berwick and Roxburgh. Such treatment of women was unprecedented. At the siege of Stirling he refused to allow the garrison to leave the castle when they surrendered, for he wanted to try out his latest siege engine on them. The English even engaged in head-hunting. The heads of Thomas and Alexander Bruce and their companions were sent in 1307 to the Prince of Wales, who used them to decorate the gates and castle keep at Carlisle.15 Actions such as these fit the pattern of inter-cultural warfare. As the war proceeded, however, the Scots were anxious to make it clear that they were fighting a just war. If that were the case, they should act in accordance with the acknowledged laws of war, and under Robert Bruce they became far more eager than the English to operate in accordance with chivalric convention. Prisoners were welltreated, ransoms were negotiated, and the death of a great English earl at Bannockbum was regretted by the Scots. For both sides, the realities of a long-lasting war meant that it made sense for each to maintain the customs of war with regard to prisoners, ensuring that the risks for noble combatants were relatively low. The war, therefore, which when it began had inter-cultural elements, became clearly intra-cultural.16 It also, as the conflict continued, increasingly came to fit the model of war between emerging nation were

states.

in the British Isles provide examples which not only fit the model of the expansion of core into periphery, but also illustrate the additional model of change in border regions. In the Anglo-Norman conquest of Ireland, which began in 1170, armoured knights, equipped with lances and mounted on heavy horses, came up against The

14

15

16

wars

The Flowers of History by Roger of Wendover (see above, n. 6), vol. 3, p. 10. Geoffrey W. S. Barrow, Robert Bruce and the Community of the Realm of Scotland (London, 1965), pp. 181, 230 and 242; Prestwich, Edward I (see above, n. 9), p. 510. Andy C. King, "According to the custom used in French and Scottish wars: Prisoners and casualties on the Scottish Marches in the fourteenth century", Journal of Medieval History 28 (2002), pp. 263-90.

Transcultural

Warfare

-

The Later Middle Ages

49

lightly armed opponents. They introduced the castle to a land which did not know such fortifications. It was not, however, a simple matter of the style of warfare developed in the core proving overwhelming. The Anglo-Normans began to adapt rapidly to the Irish style of warfare. They soon engaged in just the same kind of cattle-raids as the Irish. The Irish also adapted to changing conditions, and soon began to build castles, and to This was a land where warfare was a constant fact of life, and where as a result local conventions and customs developed to deal with issues such as the division of spoils. There were complex processes of adaptation at work among both the AngloNormans and the Irish.17 A common feature of inter-cultural and colonial frontier warfare, from the time of the Roman Empire to the British Empire, has been the recruitment of what may be termed auxiliary troops. Frequently these were lightly armed cavalry, well adapted to local conditions. Just such an element emerged from warfare on the Welsh marches in the twelfth century, in the form of lightly armed horsemen, termed muntatores,18 In the thirteenth century there was a similar development in Ireland, with the appearance of light cavalrymen, known as hobelars. With the use of troops from Ireland in Edward I's service in Scotland, this type of soldier was introduced to the Scottish borders, where they proved highly effective. These men wore light armour, and were equipped with sword and lance. They were better adapted to the guerrilla type warfare that faced the English in southern Scotland than were the fully armoured English knights and men-atarms on their heavy horses, and they were ideally suited to take part in swift mounted raids, intended to harass the enemy, and to ravage the countryside. It has often been suggested that the archer armed with a longbow first emerged in the conditions of warfare in Wales and the Welsh borders. J. E. Morris, in his great book on Edward I's Welsh wars, argued that the longbow was a traditional weapon in south Wales, and that it was in the king's wars in Wales that the English learned how to use it.19 The reality was more complex, for the longbow was known in parts of England as well as in Wales. The Sussex Weald, for example, was an important recruiting ground for archers in the 1260s.20 However, it is the case that it was in the wars in Wales and in Scotland that the English began for the first time to use large numbers of archers, recruited both from the Welsh borders and from English counties. When the English under Edward III employed longbowmen against the French, this was an example of fighting methods developed in the periphery being transferred to the core. wear armour.

17

18

19

20

Robin F. Frame, "War and Peace in the Medieval Lordship", in Robin F. Frame, Ireland and Britain 1170-1450 (London, 1998), pp. 222-7. Frederick C. Suppe, Military Institutions on the Welsh Marches: Shropshire, A.D. 1066-1300 (Woodbridge, 1994), pp. 63-87. John E. Morris, The Welsh Wars of Edward I (Oxford, 1901), pp. 15-16, 99. See for example Close Rolls of the Reign of Henry III, 1264-8, ed. Geoffrey White (London, 1937), p. 191.

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The border regions of Wales and Scotland developed their own customs and traditions. The Welsh March had its own law, distinct from that of either England or Wales, though drawing on each. Royal writs were not valid in the Marches. Offenders who fled into the Marches from England could not be pursued there; men from the Marches could not be brought before English courts.21 Private war between Marcher lords was to them, if not to the kings of England, an acceptable means of resolving disputes. In the later middle ages there was a gradual cultural assimilation of Welsh and English in the March, with an increasing acceptance of English legal and other customs. In military terms, the region was above all one which supplied archers for the English armies fighting in France. Similarly, on the Anglo-Scottish border a society developed which has its own ways of resolving disputes, with March days attended by English and Scottish officials. The endemic warfare of the region, with frequent crossborder raids, determined the development of a society in southern Scotland and northern England in which kinship was as important as lordship. The border made life easier for criminals, for they could escape the force of the law by crossing it.22 The way in which the society of this region became, by the fifteenth century, totally accustomed to war and its horrors is illustrated by a remarkable account by Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini, the future pope Pius II. He was staying in a village close to the border, enjoying a fine feast with the local people. There was then a hubbub. The men, alarmed that the Scots might be approaching, fled to a nearby tower to take refuge, leaving behind Aeneas, his companions, and the local women. Puzzled, he asked why they did not flee, and was told that they did not count rape as harm. If this was meant as a joke, it was one that the future pope took seriously.23 Both in Wales and Scotland English armies came up against opponents who fought in ways for which they were not prepared. The mounted knight was of little use against enemies who took refuge in bogs and mountains. At the bridge from Anglesey to the Welsh mainland in 1282, and again at Stirling Bridge in 1298, footsoldiers rushing down from heights showed that they could inflict defeat with severe casualties on English cavalry forces. At Bannockbum in 1314 the Scots, formed up in densely packed infantry formations, known as schiltroms, defeated the might of Edward IF s conventional army.24 The response of the English to the problems they faced was to develop different fighting methods. Experiments in 1282 in Wales with Gascon crossbowmen appear not to have been successful, but Edward I recruited infantry, and 21 22

23

24

Rees R. Davies, Lordship and Society in theMarch of Wales 1282-1400 (Oxford, 1978), p. 3. Alastair J. Macdonald, Border Bloodshed (East Linton, 2000), pp. 196-241, provides an excellent analysis of the border in the late fourteenth century. PU Secundi Pontifici Maximl Commentarli, eds. Joannes Gobellinus, Francesco B. Piccolomini and Jacopo A. Piccolomini (Frankfurt, 1614), p. 5; I Commentarl di Enea Silvio Piccolomini, ed. and trans. Giuseppe Benetti, (Milan, 1972), p. 18. Prestwich, Edward I (see above, n. 9), pp. 191-2, 478; Barrow, Robert Bruce (see above, n. 15), pp. 124-5,310-28.

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—

in particular archers, on a quite unprecedented scale. The sheer weight of the resources Edward could deploy was sufficient in itself to overpower the Welsh, but the Scots presented greater problems. There, the English needed to adapt further. When the English campaigned against the Scots who had invaded the north of England in 1327 a tactical revolution was proposed, for the knights were dismounted and ordered to fight on foot. No battle took place on that occasion, as the Scots withdrew, but the new methods were used to great effect in 1332 at Dupplin Moor, and in the following year at Halidon Hill.25 A further development in the 1330s saw the appearance in English armies of mounted archers. These men did not fight on horseback; that would have been quite impractical with the English longbow. They fought, as did the knights and men-at-arms, on foot, but they rode rather than marched. This provided armies with greatly increased mobility, and made possible the swift plundering raids, or chevauchées, that the English employed in the Hundred Years War. They also, of course, provided the fire-power that proved so effective against French cavalry forces at such battles as Crécy, Poitiers and

Agincourt.26

One theory was that these new methods of fighting were developed in simple imitation of the Scots. The English certainly did try adopting Scottish techniques: at the civil war battle of Boroughbridge in 1322 the royalist forces under Andrew Harclay were drawn up in schiltroms, following the Scottish fashion.27 This, however, was not the method the English used in the 1330s and later. Their tactics then were to use lines of dismounted knights and men-at-arms supported by bodies of archers on the flanks. This was a wholly new development, a response to the fighting methods of the Scots, rather than an imitation of them. The clash of military cultures, those of the English and their Welsh and Scottish opponents, did not, therefore, result in the spread of methods established in the European core, but instead in the development of new ways of conducting battle. These were characterised by the use of dismounted men-at-arms flanked by archers, and by the employment of lightly armed mounted troops to raid and harry enemy lands. In the Hundred Years War the English took these new methods to France. The initial strategy adopted by Edward III was a traditional one, relying on building up a great coalition of allies in the Low Countries and Germany. This was not successful; Edward had insufficient resources to meet the demands of his allies, and by the time of the siege of Tournai in 1340 it was evident that the strategy, as well as English finances, was bankrupt. The war was turned round by the use of the chevauchée and the tactics which had been developed in the Scottish wars. The combination of dismounted knights and

Nicholson, Edward III and the Scots (Oxford, 1965), pp. 32, 87-8, 133-7; Michael C. Prestwich, Armies and Warfare in the Middle Ages: the English Experience (Yale, 1996), pp. 318Ranald G. 19.

Prestwich, Armies and Warfare in the Middle Ages (see above n. 25), p. 135. Chronicon de Lanercost, ed. Joseph Stevenson (Edinburgh, 1839), p. 243.

Michael Prestwich

52

men-at-arms, with archers armed with longbows, proved astonishingly successful. There has been argument over the nature of English strategy. The traditional view was that English armies intended to avoid battle as far as possible, and to put the French under intense economic pressure as territory was destroyed, and with it tax revenues lost. The alternative, forcibly argued by Clifford Rogers, is that Edward III throughout sought battle, as much of the contemporary English propaganda claimed.28 The argument may never be resolved to universal satisfaction. What is undoubtedly the case is that the English brought a new kind of warfare to France, with both the chevauchée, and with their style of fighting in battle. The Black Prince's raid across southern France to Narbonne in 1355, when his army showed itself capable of travelling up to thirty miles a day, was possible only because the archers were mounted. Not until the years after Agincourt, in 1415, did the French discover how to deal effectively with English armies. In the later middle ages there were clear conventions regarding the way in which the spoils of war were to be divided, how prisoners were to be treated, and how they could be ransomed. These were already well-known by the twelfth century, even though it was not until the fourteenth that an extensive literature was produced to explain the ways in which the laws of war should operate.29 The lower classes of society were not a party to all of this, and as a result, war which involved the common people might well have an inter-cultural quality, with chivalric conventions ignored. No doubt many considered that peasants and townspeople were fair game, as they did not play by the same rules as did knights. An extreme example is provided by the Flemish mercenaries and others who flocked to England to take advantage of the conditions of civil war in King Stephen's reign. They showed no consideration for the English peasantry who, even allowing for the exaggerations of chroniclers, were mercilessly exploited.30 There is also a mass of evidence to show the appalling treatment that was meted out to the peasantry in the course of the Hundred Years War. The countryside was ravaged, and heavy collective ransoms imposed. There was even bitter resentment at the behaviour of garrisons whose ostensible role was to defend the land against attack.31 Such conduct was of course criticised. Honoré Bonet, writing in the late fourteenth century, remarked that 'all wars are directed against the poor labouring people and against their goods and chattels. I do not call that war, but it seems to me to be pillage

Rogers, War Cruel and Sharp. English Strategy under Edward III (Woodbridge, 2000), passim. Matthew Strickland, War and Chivalry. The Conduct and Perception of War in England and Normandy, 1066-1217 (Cambridge, 1996), analyzes chivalric conduct in the twelfth century. For the laws of war in the fourteenth century, Maurice H. Keen, The Laws of War in the Middle Ages (London, 1965). See for example Gesta Stephanl, eds. Kenneth R. Potter and Ralph H. C. Davis (Oxford, 1976), pp. 154, 188. Nicholas Wright, Knights and Peasants. The Hundred Years War in the French Countryside (Woodbridge, 1998), pp. 62-80. See above all Clifford J.

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Warfare -

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robbery. Further, that way of warfare does not follow the worthy ordinances of chivalry or of the ancient custom of warriors who upheld justice, the orphan and the poor.'32 There were instances in which knights did their best to protect the common people from the horrors of war. William Marshal in the twelfth century ordered his men to protect a woman whose house was burned during the sack of Le Mans. Thomas Holland and some other English knights acted honourably in a similar manner at the sack of Caen in 1346.33 While members of garrisons of English-held castles in Normandy in the fifteenth century showed no mercy to male peasants, they rarely made women captive, and they showed honour to members of the clergy.34 However, incidents such as the Black Prince's sacking of Limoges, or the slaughter of the inhabitants of Cesena in Italy in 1377 by Sir John Hawkwood's men, along with other mercenaries, show the way in which men of knightly calibre were capable of treating those they regarded as their social inferiors.35 Battles which can be interpreted in terms and

of class conflict had an inter-cultural element. Frederick Barbarossa's defeat at the hands of the Lombard townspeople at Legnano in 1178 provides one example. Others include Stirling Bridge in Scotland in 1297, when William Wallace defeated the English with an army bom out of popular rebellion against the English, and Courtrai in 1302, when the flower of French chivalry was defeated by a largely urban Flemish army. In the twelfth century, mercenaries were notorious; they were even regarded as heretical, and were thus viewed as culturally distinct. They were also highly effective. The use of paid troops recruited from the Low Countries, fighting on foot, and armed with crossbows, was one of the reasons that Henry II was able to defeat his opponents in the great rebellion he faced in 1173-4. These troops, many of them the same men, were also an important element in Frederick Barbarossa's armies in Italy. The use of the crossbow by these troops was a significant new element in warfare, which was duly condemned by the In the fourteenth century, mercenary companies, such as the Great Company and the White Company, recruited from England, France, Germany and elsewhere, dominated inter-city warfare in

papacy.36

Italy.37

The Tree of Battles of Honoré Bonet, ed. George W. Coopland (Liverpool, 1949), p. 189. David Crouch, William Marshal. Court, Career and Chivalry in the Angevin Empire 1147-1219 (London, 1990), p. 172; Chroniques de Jean Froissart, eds. Simeon Luce, Gaston Raynaud, Leon Mirot and Albert Mirot, 15 vols. (Paris, 1869-1975), vol. 3, p. 145. Nicholas Wright, Knights and Peasants (see above, n. 31), p. 31. Frances S. Saunders, Hawkwood, the Diabolical Englishman (London, 2004), pp. 216-24. Michael Prestwich, "Money and Mercenaries in English Medieval Annies", in England and Germany in the High Middle Ages, eds. Alfred Haverkamp and Hanna Vollrath (Oxford, 1996), pp. 138-43; Jacques Boussard, "Les mercenaries au xiie siècle: Henry II Plantagenet et les origins de l'année de metier", Bibliothèque de l'école des chartes 106 (1945-6), pp. 189-224. The fullest study of these mercenaries is Kenneth Fowler, Medieval Mercenaries 1: The Great

Companies (Oxford, 2001).

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The introduction of the crossbow, though significant, was not a revolutionary II's mercenaries were highly effective, but did not destroy the of the mounted knight on the battlefield in the later twelfth century. It is supremacy too far to interpret the warfare in which these men were involved the definition pushing as truly inter-cultural. The English, Germans and others who flocked to Italy in the later fourteenth century no doubt introduced some new tactics, and their employment by the Italian city governments meant that wars lasted longer. The cost of recmiting such men had its impact on state finances. It is nevertheless questionable whether all this amounted to a fundamental transformation of warfare. The attitude and motivation of many of the mercenaries no doubt stood in contrast to the views of many of their employers, but again, the difference was not so great as to warrant the use of an intercultural model in explanation. Thus far the argument has centred on knights; castles were another important element of medieval military culture, and one which provides another means of testing different models. Here the concept of the core has obvious appeal; the castle as a fortified aristocratic residence was a western European phenomenon, and a widely accepted argument is that its origins lay in late tenth century France. The count of Anjou's fortified hall at Langeais, dating from the 990s, is a notable early example, while the excavations at Doué-la-Fontaine have shown the way in which an undefended Carolingian hall was converted into a castle by the early eleventh century.38 From such beginnings the castle spread across Europe. This is, of course, a vastly over-simplified picture, but one not without some truth. In the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries there were major developments in castle-building. It is no longer possible to sustain the argument that the Crusader lands were the crucible where the changes first appeared. Features such as the use of concentric lines of defence and of round, rather than square, mural towers, with the abandonment of the keep as a last line of defence, are as characteristic of western Europe as of the Latin east. An early example of the new type of polygonal castle with round comer towers is to be found at Le-Coudray Salbart in Poitou, which dates from the first twenty years of the thirteenth century.39 Limerick in the west of Ireland, built by King John, is another. Boulogne, dating from the late 1220s, is of similar type, as is Bolingbroke in Lincolnshire.40 There is no evident spread of this type of castle from the centre to the periphery; it is rather a matter of simultaneous development across much of western Europe.

change. Henry

Michel de Bouard, "De l'aula au donjon. Les fouilles de la motte de La Chapelle, â Doué-laFontaine (Xe-XIe s.)", Archéologie Médiévale 3-4 (1973-4), pp. 5-110. P.E. Curnow, "Some Developments in Military Architecture c. 1200: Le Coudray Salbart", Proceedings of the Battle Conference on Anglo-Norman Studies II1979 (Woodbridge, 1980), pp. 42-62; HughN. Kennedy, Crusader Castles (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 186-9. Limerick is discussed by Tom McNeill, Castles in Ireland. Feudal Power in a Gaelic World (London, 1997), pp. 46-55.

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-

magnificent castles that Edward I built in Wales provide an example of the spread of military technology from the core to the periphery. Detailed architectural and documentary study shows that the master masons were recruited from Savoy. There are difficulties even here, for although the details of the masonry are undoubtedly Savoyard, the overall concepts of the castles were not. The use of twin-towered gatehouses, and the way in which the castles were sited, were very different from the castles of Savoy. In many ways Edward's castles go back to an English and Angevin tradition. Exceptionally, the finest one of all castles, Caemarfon, pays homage in its design to the late Roman walls of Constantinople. These castles show both the dissemination of ideas which came from outside the British Isles, and the development of English traditions. There is no simple model of development that can be applied. There is no doubt, however, that the castles of conquest built by Edward I were qualitatively immensely superior to the existing castles of the Welsh princes. These were small, with limited defensive features, of which the most sophisticated were D shaped towers.41 The differences between the two types, the English and the Welsh, are an expression in stone of the cultural contrasts between the two peoples. The conquest of Wales resulted in the construction of the most up-to-date and sophisticated chain of castles in all Europe, and so to some extent fits the border region model, suggesting as it does that it was at the interfaces where cultures clashed that the major advances were made. The Anglo-Scottish border presents a very different story, which fits this model rather better. Here the change from a relatively peaceful society in the thirteenth century to one dominated by war, with raid and counter-raid, led to the adoption of a very specific style of building. The need was not for great castles such as those that Edward I had built in Wales; local defences were required, which would be sufficient to provide a place of safety when raids took place. Existing manor houses were converted into defensible structures, frequently by the addition of square towers.42 The

The so-called tower houses became, in the course of the fourteenth century, increasingly common both north and south of the border, while the type was also much used in another region of increasingly endemic warfare, Ireland.43 How effective they were is hard to determine; the successful capture or defence of minor fortresses was not a matter to concern chroniclers. These relatively simple defensive structures were a specific solution to local problems, and demonstrate the way in which war could create a distinctive culture. Nor, of course, was it solely in Britain that the conditions of frontier warfare provided the impetus to develop particular styles of military architecture. German expansion into the Baltic provides another example, with the great castles built by the Teutonic knights punctuating the advance into the Baltic regions.

Cestyll Twysogion Gwynedd (Cardiff, 1983), analyzes the native Welsh castles. Philip Dixon, "From Hall to Tower: the Change in Seignorial Houses on the Anglo-Scottish Border after c. 1250", Thirteenth Century England 4 (Woodbridge, 1991), pp. 85-107. McNeill, Castles in Ireland (see above, n. 40), pp. 211-23. Richard Avent,

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The later medieval period did not witness inter-cultural warfare to the extent or scale of the preceding centuries. Although it saw colonial expansion, notably to the east in the Baltic, but also in Ireland and elsewhere, such wars of conquest became progressively more intra-cultural. Crusading warfare increasingly took place between opponents who were well accustomed to each other. Yet war was often represented in inter-cultural terms, for this was a period in which national stereotypes, often crudely delineated, were commonly accepted. Various models of warfare can be suggested, both inter-cultural and intra-cultural; a concept of particular importance is that of the expansion of the core into the periphery. The nature of war in the medieval period was complex, and the reasons why men fought were varied. There were economic motives; the desire to gain land, to profit from plunder and ransoms had their part to play. There were powerful religious causes, associated above all with the crusades. There were ideological reasons; it was hardly surprising that wars were fought when there were chivalric concepts which glorified the performance of feats of arms. The knight referred to at the start of this paper was Sir William Marmion; the castle he rode out from was Wark, on the Scottish border, and the time was the early fourteenth century. The model of chivalric heroism that he represented needs to be tempered; he did not drive off the Scots besieging the castle, but had to be rescued by the hardened soldiers of the garrison, who fought on foot.44 There was a harsh reality to medieval warfare, underneath the chivalric gloss.

Scalacronica of Sir Thomas

Gray, ed. Joseph Stevenson (Edinburgh, 1836), p.

145.

Bernhard R. Kroener

Antichrist, Archenemy, Disturber of the

Peace Forms and Means of Violent Conflict in the Early Modern Ages -

I. On 3rd August, 1757 a French expeditionary force of 3500 men, under the command of the maréchal de camp, Louis Joseph marquis de Montcalm-Gozon de Saint Veran, accompanied by around 1500 Indian warriors reached the British Fort William Henry on the upper Hudson. Situated on the route from New York via Albany to the north, it represented the gateway to French Canada. In the opposite direction the occupation of this post opened the way for the French to the centre of the English colonies on the American east coast. Montcalm carried out the siege in line with the rules of European warfare, by first bombarding the fort with artillery before requiring the English commander, Colonel George Monro, to surrender. In view of the opponents' superiority and insufficient supplies, the British side quickly consented to the honourable conditions of surrender, which bound their unchecked retreat to the condition that the troops would not be deployed against France within the following 18 months. This constitutes a clear example for an operation based on rational standards in the Age of Enlightenment. Scarcely had the column of around 2300 English soldiers left the fort, than the Indian warriors attacked them and killed 29 men, before the French were finally able to put a stop to the massacre. The English propaganda seized upon the incident in order to complain about the uncivilized barbarism in the way the other side waged war. The charge was made against the French leadership that they had wanted to encourage their Indian helpers to fight more enthusiastically by distributing alcohol.

Bernhard R. Kroener

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After the fort had not been stormed and plundered, the French had finally lost control of the troops.1 This example vividly illustrates central aspects of our topic. The officers and political pamphleteers, whose thinking was shaped by the European warfare of the 18th century, described the reported events as a massacre, blaming the enemy for breaking the rules. An opponent who had the status of a combatant should be guaranteed that, in the event of an honourable capitulation, he would come to no physical harm. According to this understanding, the Indian warriors were auxiliary forces and thus members of the opposing military machine who had to respect this

norm.2

slaughter was described as a massacre. However, one cannot find this term in the reports of the annihilation of Indian warriors written by European soldiers. Thus the term massacre does not express the killing of the weak and defenceless; rather its roots lie in a cultural perception: it distinguishes the degree of the opponent's civilisation. Without a doubt this can be interpreted psychoanalytically as a question of preservation or destruction of ways of life which are of existential importance. The manifestation of superiority, which is inseparably connected to the power over life or death of another warrior, can at the same time be an expression of subliminal fears of repression.3 This insight is universally accepted for the massacres of our time from My Lai to Rwanda. The use of the term "massacre" makes clear that at least one of the warring parties saw this form of the military engagement as a breach of the conventional rules of war. As one of the most extreme human experiences, war has at all times and in all cultures required rules by means of which individual fears could In this context the

be channelled. The resulting codification of the practice of war was binding for both sides. If one side or one group of combatants was not acknowledged as equal, this breach of norms was and is generally characterized by appropriate terminology. One party may use it as a justification for its breach of rules, while the other side may use it to characterise the war crimes which have been committed against it. But, as the above example shows, the dividing lines often cannot be clearly drawn.

Fred Anderson, Crucible of War: die Seven Years War and the Fate of the Empire in British North America 1754-1766 (New York, 2000), pp. 185-201; William J. Eccles, France in America, The New American Nation Series (New York, 1972), p. 191. Christopher Duffy, The Military Experience in the Age of Reason (London, 1987), p. 293. Gaston Bouthoul, Kindermord aus Staatsraison. Der Krieg als bevölkerungspolitischer Ausgleich (Stuttgart, 1972), p. 15 [French orig.: L'infanticide différé (Paris, 1970)]; Fleinrich von Stietencron, "Töten im Krieg: Grundlagen und Entwicklungen", in Töten im Krieg, eds. Heinrich von Stietencron and Jörg Rüpke, Historische Anthropologie 6 (Freiburg 1995), pp. 17-56, here pp. 28f. '

2

3

Antichrist, Archenemy, Disturber of the Peace

59

Unfortunately, Jean Delumeau did not apply his seminal study of the manifestations of fear in the west to the phenomenon of war. He missed an opportunity to examine the relationship of collective fears and the loss of order.4 The conflict fought out in the New World in 1757 was an encounter between two European powers which took place on a non-European war zone using non-European auxiliaries under European command. Thus the conflict remained subject to the specific conventions of organized violence and the rules of war which were accepted by both sides. However, the Indian warriors could also claim that their conduct was in accordance with the war rituals of their tribal tradition.5 For historians and anthropologists of the 19th and 20th centuries, war and culture formed a symbiosis rooted in the tradition of romantic bellicosity.6 The secular catastrophe of the World Wars rendered this conceptualisation almost obscene in the eyes of subsequent generations.7 In view of the return of war, which also affected Europe, and in view of the deployment of EU soldiers in peacemaking and peacekeeping missions, modern cultural science has given much thought to the "culture of war".8 Before we can discuss the nature and form of transcultural wars, we must first clarify what we mean by culture. Culture can be understood as the sum of a society's collectively internalized patterns of memory, perception and interpretation. These are to be understood as cultural structures which influence individual behaviour.9 A modem history of the culture of war attempts to use concepts of a theory of action, which resolve the methodically unsatisfactory dichotomy of structures and protagonists. It draws on the memories and 4

Jean Delumeau, Angst im Abendland. Die Geschichte kollektiver Ängste Im Europa des 14. bis 18. Jahrhunderts (Hamburg, 1989) [French orig.: La Peur en Occident XlV-XVIIf siècles (Paris,

5

Goldschmidt, "Inducement to Military Participation in Tribal Societies", in: The Anthropology of War and Peace: Perspectives on the Nuclear War, eds. Paul R. Turner and David Pitt (Massachusetts, 1989), pp. 15-31. Max Jähns, Über Krieg, Frieden und Kultur. Eine Umschau, 2nd ed. (Berlin, 1893); Otto SchmidtGibichenfels, Der Krieg als Kulturfaktor, als Schöpfer und Erhalter der Staaten, 2nd ed. (Berlin, 1916); Johannes Kunisch and Herfried Münkler, eds., Die Wiedergeburt des Krieges aus dem Geist der Revolution. Studien zum bellizistischen Diskurs des ausgehenden 18. und beginnenden 19. Jahrhunderts, Beiträge zur Politischen Wissenschaft 10 (Berlin, 1999). John U. Nef, La Guerre et le Progrès Humain (Paris, 1955), ch. XIV. La culture européenne contre

1978)].

Walter

6

7

la violence, pp. 329ff. Karl Otto Hondrich, Wieder Krieg (Frankfurt/Main, 2002); Andreas Herberg-Rothe, Der Krieg. Geschichte und Gegenwart (Frankfurt/Main, 2003); Herfried Münkler, Die neuen Kriege

8

9

(Hamburg, 2002).

Edward W. Said, "Kultur, Identität und Geschichte", in Kulturtheorien der Gegenwart. Ansätze und Positionen, eds. Gerhart Schröder and Helga Breuninger (Frankfurt/Main, 2001), pp. 39-57, here p. 55.

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myths, images and symbols by which a society processes the experience of war and makes it useable for the praxis of organized violence.10 The place of violence in a society's self-image gives information about the extent of concepts of the enemy, but it also provides the key to explaining specific perceptions of threat. These, in turn, form a central impetus for the readiness to war and for motivation in battle, which find visible expression in the ritualisation of violence.11 Thus, war represents a violent exchange between two or more adversaries who mutually accept the other's right to conduct war and regard the rituals of hostile action as obligatory. This acceptance of violence presupposes an understanding of equality which in view of the social organisation and the means available for the conduct of war was in early modem times not always possible.12 The intensity of a concept of 'enemy' is in the first instance determined by the extent of shared views of world and society, and of common systems of value and orientation. 13 The less these factors are shared, the stronger is the transcultural element of war. First we shall examine the specific prerequisites for war in early modem times and then we shall attempt to develop a typology of early modern warfare.

II. introductory example. The Indian auxiliaries of the French were an formation which conducted the war according to their own cultural independent orientation. In the war mythology of societies, in which hand-to-hand combat is the central element of battle, the death of the opponent is necessary to allow his warlike strength to flow to the victor.

Let

11

us

return to our

Anne Lipp, "Diskurs und Praxis. Militärgeschichte als Kulturgeschichte", in Was ist Militärgeschichte?, eds. Thomas Kühne and Benjamin Ziemann, Krieg in der Geschichte 6, (Paderborn, 2000), pp. 211-227, here p. 212. Martin Dinges, "Formwandel der Gewalt in der Neuzeit. Zur Kritik der Zivilisationstheorie von Norbert Elias", in Kulturen der Gewalt. Ritualisierung und Symbolisierung von Gewalt in der Geschichte, eds. Rolf Peter Sieferle and Helga Breuninger (Frankfurt/Main, 1998), pp. 171-194; Markus Meumann and Dirk Niefanger, eds., Ein Schauplatz herber Angst. Wahrnehmung und Darstellung von Gewalt im 17. Jahrhundert (Göttingen, 1997); Thomas Lindenberger and Alf Lüdtke, "Einleitung: Physische Gewalt eine Kontinuität der Moderne", in Physische Gewalt. Studien zur Geschichte der Neuzeit, eds Thomas Lindenberger and Alf Lüdtke (Frankfurt/Main, 1995), pp. 7-30. Heinz Duchhardt, "La guerre et le droit des gens de guerre dans l'Europe du XIVe au XVIIe siècle", in Guerre et concurrence entre les États européens du XIVe au XVIIe siècle, ed. Philippe Contamine (Paris, 1998), pp. 339-364; Heinhard Steiger, "Die Träger des ius belli ac pacis 16481806", in Staat und Krieg. Vom Mittelalter bis zur Moderne, ed. Werner Rösener (Göttingen, -

12

13

2000), pp. 115-135. Cora

Stephan, Das Handwerk des Krieges (Berlin, 1998), p. 40.

Antichrist, Archenemy, Disturber of the Peace

61

killing of an opponent thus directly serves the survival of one's own group and undergirds this group's identity.14 The culturally conditioned restraint on the part of the British and French troops stood in contrast with the Indians' imperative to kill, which also had cultural connotations. It was a case of the clash of two fundamentally divergent cultural practices. It can be observed that the more distant, the stranger, the more unknown the opponent appears or is represented to the perceiver, the less "humane" treatment he can expect. 5 The specifics of this conflict can certainly be characterized by the term "transcultural war". Yet, our example also shows that war in the Early Modern Period, like all forms of social interaction, obviously defies exclusive classifications that tend towards an ideal The

type such as "intracultural" and "transcultural" wars. What can be categorized according to the form of war receives a different attribution due to the intensity of the means of warfare. The epithets "barbaric" and "massacre" by which the British judged the French conduct of the war, show that the opponent, at least in this instance, had left the community of cultural equals by breaking the rules of war. The differing degrees of radicality with which conflicts were pursued in the Early Modem Period and at other times allows us to make distinctions according to whether the battle was aimed at a cultural equal or an opponent whose legitimacy in conducting war was denied. If the two first-named types of war can easily be described as intra- or transcultural wars, the third type of war occupies a complex special position which needs to be examined in more detail.'6 The conscious exclusion from a transcendentally justified system of laws released extremely radical forms of conflict even among members of a common cultural area, which were otherwise reserved only for those foreign to the culture, that is, for the enemy who was perceived to pose an existential threat.17

15

16

17

Stietencron, ed., Töten im Krieg(see above, n. 3), p. 40, pp. 151-178. Stravros Mentzos, Der Krieg und seine psychosozialen Funktionen (Frankfurt/Main, 1993), p. 122, Mentzos justifiably subjected affect control in the sense of Norbert Elias' civilisation theory to a critical extension which however does not appear relevant in this context. Chaim F. Shatan, "Militarisierte Trauer und Rachezeremoniell", in Krieg und Frieden aus psychoanalytischer Sicht, eds. Peter Passett and Emilio Modena (München, 1987), pp. 220-249.

I am using here the terminology which Stephen Morillo suggested in his contribution to this volume. With regard to the specific types of war in the Early Modern Age, modifications are required when assigning subcultural war to the category of transcultural war. I shall discuss this in detail. The religious wars in France in the 16lh century, the revolution in England in the 17lh century and the Thirty Years War in central Europe, in this context, provide images and interpretations well known even beyond historical research. Denis Crouzet, Les guerriers de Dieu. La violence au temps des troubles de religion, vers 1525- vers 1610, 2 vols. (Seyssel, 1990).

Bernhard R. Kroener

62

the European circumstances, the type of subcultural war requires an additional differentiation in line with the territorial and system-specific legitimacy of power achieved in the early modem process of creating states. State wars are liable to concepts of self and enemy which can be transmitted. An understanding of limits underlies them which makes it possible in the first place to distinguish between internal and external, between self and other.18 Johannes Burkhardt has convincingly called this fundamental process of European history, which lasted for generations, the era of the "Staatenbildungskrieg", the wars of state formation.19 It is a sign of an unsettled statehood that it has as well as the traditional concept of political order (a vertical hierarchy of legitimacy), an additional horizontal differentiation which separated the internal from the external. From the 15th century onwards, clashes between competing powers intensified within a common cultural circle. A different interpretation of the legitimacy of war determined the character of the way war was waged. The legal disparity between the conflicting parties led to the generic designation "war" as an expression of a legitimate conflict between states being emphasized by the side which was concerned about a confirmation or a legitimizing revaluation of its claim to power. The opposite side, for their part, considered the conflict as an unjustified attack on their claim to power for which sufficient reasons were cited from the tradition of convention.20 The resulting fight to drive them out could allow the perception of an existential threat to arise, under whose influence the rules of violent clashes, which were used between adversaries who were equal in status in terms of legitimate war, were either partially or completely abolished. The one-sided exclusion from the existing order of law could also in certain circumstances mean an exclusion from the common basis of values and cultures. In the early phase of the European wars of formation of the states, we are dealing with "subcultural wars" in which in certain circumstances the instruments of transcultural clashes were used. It is only with the recognition of the equal status of the European states that the move to the "Staatenpositionskriege", the wars which positioned the states, was completed in the late 17th and 18th centuries.21 During the entire period on

Regarding

19

20

21

Herfried Münkler, "Feindbilder. Bilder vom Feind", in Politische Bilder, Politik der Metaphern, ed. Herfried Münkler (Frankfurt/Main, 1994), pp. 22-34; Franz Bosbach, ed., Feindbilder, Die Darstellung des Gegners in der politischen Publizistik des Mittelalters und der Frühen Neuzeit (Köln, 1992); Herfried Münkler, Über den Krieg. Stationen der Kriegsgeschichte im Spiegel ihrer theoretischen Reflexion (Weilerswist, 2002), pp. 34-37. Johannes Burkhardt, "Die Friedlosigkeit der Frühen Neuzeit. Grundlegung einer Theorie der Bellizität Europas", Zeitschriftfür Historische Forschung 24 (1997), pp. 509-574. The process of becoming a state of the Swiss confederations in conflict between Habsburg and Burgundy provides a notable example for a conflict occurring beyond denominational lines of argument. Thomas A. Brady, Turning Swiss. Cities and Empire. 1450-1550 (Cambridge, 1985). On this, extending the terminology introduced by Burkhardt: Bernhard R. Kroener, "Herrschaftsverdichtung als Kriegsursache: Wirtschaft und Rüstung im Siebenjährigen Krieg", in

Antichrist, Archenemy, Disturber of the Peace

63

the periphery of the European world of states and in the colonial of transcultural war remained.22

expansion wars forms

III. phenomenon of the "war massacre", the process of an increasing regulation of warfare in European history is vividly present. An analysis of the term massacre as it has been used in political discourse and its change in meaning brings forth unexpected results. The etymological derivation and the interpretation of the semantic history of the term leads immediately to the centre of In the

discussion. The term "Massaker" is not found in any of the standard etymological lexicons of the German language. In the encyclopedias and conversation lexicons it had been predominantly used in its French form, massacre, up to the middle of the 20th century and was described as "slaughter, bloodbath".23 This use of the word points back to the 18th century when the French substantive massacre was worth an entry in Zedlers our

Universallexikon.24 But

the French term is of comparatively recent origin: massacre or the verb, only been part of the French vocabulary since the middle of the 16th since to be precise. The starting point is the Old French verb macecler 1564 century, which in tum comes from the medieval Latin matteuculare ( 1165) striking dead (from matteuca club). From this root la massue is also derived: knobbled stick, even

massacrer, has

=

=

club.25

As an instrument of killing, archaic instrument for beating.

Wie Kriege 174.

astonishingly, it points not to a weapon of war but to an

entstehen, ed. Bernd Wegner, Krieg in der Geschichte

4

(Paderborn, 2000),

pp. 145-

Wolfgang Reinhard, Geschichte der europäischen Expansion, vol. 2: Die Neue Welt (Stuttgart, 1985), pp. 175f. Hermann Paul, Deutsches Wörterbuch, 5lh ed. (Tübingen, 1966); Friedrich Kluge, Etymologisches Lexikon der Deutschen Sprache, 2 lsl ed. (Berlin, 1975); Meyers Großes Konversations-Lexikon, 6th ed. (Leipzig, 1906), vol. 13, p. 401 only proves the term Massacre; likewise Meyers Lexikon, 7th ed. (Leipzig, 1928), vol. 8, p. 26; Meyers Enzyklopädisches Lexikon, 8th ed. (Mannheim, 1975), vol. 15, p. 719, cites the Germanised term "Massaker". Dictionaries of foreign words prove earlier existence of Massaker, Lutz Mackensen, ed., Deutsches Wörterbuch, 3rd ed. (Laupheim, 1955), p. 507.

Großes vollständiges Universal-Lexikon aller Wissenschaften und Künste, vol. 1-64, suppl. vols. 14 (Halle, 1732-1754, reprint Graz, 1961-1964), vol. 19, p. 1954. Paul Robert, Dictionnaire alphabéthique et analogique de la langue française (Paris, 1972), p. 1052.

Bernhard R. Kroener

64

Following from the definition of 1564 of massacrer or massacre, the Encyclopédie 1751 says: "C'est l'action de tuer impitoyablement ceux sur lesquels on a quelque avantage qui les a mis sans défense"}6 We are dealing here first of all with an explanation trying to account for the superficial manifestation of the killing process. For this reason, the use of the word dates from the second half of the 16th century (1564). From here the question of a possible periodisation arises. Were there no massacres before the middle of the 16th century or was the word creation reacting to a particular social situation? In a first phase, which covers the Late Middle Ages up to the middle of the 16th century, the violent killing of defenceless people in the context of a military clash was not yet associated with the negative term massacre. The warlike world of the 14th and 15th centuries was marked by a considerable structural violence. The clashes before the beginning of the Hundred Years' War, such as the battle of the spurs at Courtray, the fight against the Scottish border clans at Bannockbum, the clash of the Habsburgs with the confederates at Morgarten, provide sufficient proof of military massacres avant la lettre.27 During this period a further development in European warfare led to decisive changes in terms of military-technical tactics and in legal terms: to the knightly combat, the infantry 16th developed century.28 In the consciousness of law in contemporary society, the recognition grew that war and feuds, criminal prosecution and warfare were becoming increasingly separate from each other.29

1. From the

despised position of the handyman to become a decisive weapon of the

2.

Denis Diderot and Jean Baptiste d'Alembert, Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, vol. 1-17, suppl. vols. 1-4, reg. vols. 1-2, plates 1-1 u. 1 suppl. vol. (Paris, 1751-1780, reprint Stuttgart, 1966), vol. 10, p. 176. Courtray (1302): Jan F. Verbruggen, De krijgkunst in west-europa in de middeleeuwen (IXe tot XIVe eeuw) (Brüssel, 1954); the same, De slag der guldensporen, bijdrage tot de geschiedenis van vlaanderens vrijheidsoorlog 1297-1305 (Antwerpen, 1952), pp. 262-275; Bannockburn (1314): W. M. Mackenzie, 77;e Battle of Bannockburn: A Study in Medieval Warfare (Glasgow, 1913); A. A. M. Duncan, "The War of the Scots, 1306-1326", Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th series 2 (1992), pp. 139-142; Morgarten (1315): Wilhelm Sidler, Die Schlacht am Morgarten

(Zürich, 1910). Kelly DeVries, Infantry Warfare in the Early Fourteenth Century (Woodbridge, 1996); Clifford J. Rogers, "The Military Revolution of the Hundred Years' War", Journal of Military History 57 (1993), pp. 241-278. Wilhelm Janssen, s. v. "Krieg", in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, eds. Otto Brunner, Werner Conze and Reinhart Koselleck, vol. 3 (Stuttgart, 1985), pp. 567-615; Gerd Althoff, "Regeln der Gewaltanwendung im Mittelalter", in Kulturen der Gewalt: Ritual und Symbolisierung von Gewalt in der Geschichte, eds. Rolf Peter Sieferle and Helga Breuninger (Frankfurt/Main, 1998), pp. 154-170.

Antichrist, Archenemy, Disturber of the Peace

65

In the high Middle combat which was

Ages, the infantry occupied a subordinate function in knightly equivalent to its position in contemporary society. It was not that uncommon infantrymen were run over by their own cavalry rushing forward. They subordinate staff who were not counted among the combatants but were considered part of the equipment of the armies. If they were captured, they could scarcely expect to be ransomed. The mass killing of infantrymen in battle, either by opponents or by their own fighters, or as prisoners, does not therefore come under the later definition of a massacre, because they were not regarded as warriors but as moveable objects.30 This position determined their treatment during a "guerre des seigneurs", i.e. the open war {guerre ouverte) subject to knightly norms, as well as during a "guerre mortelle" (guerre de feu et de sang, guerre couverte). The latter was a form of criminal prosecution and atonement in the form of feuds in which, for instance, the butchery of the peasant population of the opponent was regarded as a justifiable way to inflict damage on the enemy. Under the legal conditions of a feud, the massacre could thus have the character of a measure of atonement.31 In the literature, the severity of the offensive warfare of the Swiss infantry of the 15th and early 16th century has been highlighted. Even contemporary educated chroniclers, such as the Alsation Wimpheling tending towards the Habsburg site, with the moral rigidity of Humanism criticized the fact that were

"bei der Gefangennahme sei größere Menschlichkeit bei den Türken und Böhmen zu finden als bei diesen starken drohenden grimmigen stolzen waffenliebenden stets zum Krieg bereiten von der Wiege an zum Kampf erzogenen, an Christenblut sich weidenden und durch die Zwietracht der Könige reich gewordenen Wilden... "

["being taken captive, greater humanity is to be found among the Turks and Bohemians than among these strongly threatening grimly proud lovers of weapons, always ready for war, who have been brought up from the cradle to fight, revelling in the blood of Christians and wild people who have become rich due to the discord of the

kings..."]32 The opponents, characterized as wild men beyond the godly order of salvation besides the Swiss footsoldiers mentioned in the quote from Wimpheling, this included Ottoman warriors and Hussite religious warriors from Bohemia counted as a danger -

-

31

32

DeVries, Infantry Warfare (see above, n. 28), pp. 169f. Philippe Contamine, La Guerre au Moyen Age, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1986), p. 414, pp. 458-460; the same,

"Une contrôle étatique croissant. Les usages de la guerre du XIVe au XVIIIe siècle: rançons et butins", in Guerre et concurrence entre les États européens du XIVe au XVIIIe siècle, ed. Philippe Contamine (Paris, 1998), pp. 199-236, here p. 205. Wilhelm Oechsli, Quellenbuch zur Schwelzergeschichte, vol. 1 (Zürich, 1900), p. 375; Walter Schaufelberger, Der Alte Schweizer und sein Krieg. Studien zur Kriegführung vornehmlich im 15. Jahrhundert, 3rd ed. (Frauenfeld, 1987), p. 178.

Bernhard R. Kroener

66

mankind. The exclusion without compromise as a prerequisite for lawlessness appears repeatedly in the legitimizations of war in the early Modem Period.33 This applies to the same extent to the civilized "other", whose otherness caused fear of displacement. Together with religiously motivated exclusion the clash could escalate into a deadly struggle about displacement. Thus the political adversary of the Confederates in the Burgundy wars, Charles the Bold, tried to justify his brutal proceedings by using the negative stereotype which has been called on repeatedly since then: "mörder... quia nullum reciperent captivum, sed omnes quotquot attingerent, occiderent, nulli parcentes..." This painful complaint was made known after Grandson and particularly after the Battle of Morat.34 In the course of this battle the structural causes of massacres can be uncovered, which in similar constellations during the entire early Modem Period can be repeatedly observed, albeit with decreasing intensity. The declaration of war, with which the Confederate representatives in agreement with France declared war upon the Duke of Burgundy, reads equally well as a declaration of a feud. War and feud are still identical so that only the quantity and extent of the clash distinguishes a war from a private Streitaustrag. Thus on 25th October, 1474:

to

"Üch und den Üwern, wie die genennt sind, Unser offen Findtschaft hiemit sagen und verkünden, für uns, alle die Unsern und die so uns zu versprechen stehen, und was nun solcher Fyndschaft halb gegen Üch, den Üwern und Gesandten und Helfern machen wird, es sye mit Raub, Todschlägen Mord Brand, Angriffen und Beschädigungen Tag oder Nacht durch uns die Unsern...damit wollen wir uns aller Ehr wohl bewahrt haben.

"

you and yours, as named, we hereby declare and announce our open enmity, for us, all and those who have promised to help us, and what will be done according to such enmity against you, yours, your messengers and helpers, is to be with robbery, deadly blows, murder, arson, attacks and damage, day or night...by this we want to protect our honour."]35

["To

ours

The openly-announced enmity allowed Schädigung to the opponent even by killing, and it was clearly emphasized that the honour of the confederates could not be harmed in this way. While the communities of the Confederation, in keeping with their communal traditions, claimed the ius ad bellum for themselves, the announcement meant unacceptably offending Charles the Bold's personal honour: According to his interpretation of the law, the Confederates, as members of the Empire, could not have

Repgen, "Kriegslegitimationen in Alteuropa", Historische Zeitschrift 241 (1985), pp. 2750. J. Knebel, Capellani Ecclesiae Basiliensis Diarium 1413-1479, Basler Chroniken vol. 3, p. 88, quoted in: Schaufelberger, Der Alte Schweizer (see above, n. 32), p. 178. Amtliche Sammlung der älteren Eidgenössischen Abschiede, vol. 2: Eidgenössische Abschiede von 1425-1477, ed. A. Ph. Segesser (Luzern, 1863), p. 382; Emanuel von Rodt, Die Feldzüge Karls des Kühnen, Herzogs von Burgund und seiner Erben, 2 vols. (Schaffhausen, 1843-1844), vol. 1, p. 272; Klaus Schelle, Karl der Kühne. Der letzte Burgunderherzog (Stuttgart, 1977), p. 175. Konrad

Antichrist, Archenemy, Disturber of the Peace

67

the status of equal combatants. As far as he was concerned, the Confederates were a bunch of rebellious peasants, against whom it was legitimate to lead a punitive

expedition.36

This pattern of thought shows quite clearly that one reason for massacres in the early Modern Period can be found in the lack of an equal status of the opponents, and, therefore, in the repeal ofparticular norms of behaviour linked to social and political

equality.

The small town of Grandson had taken a Bernese garrison; the Burgundy army succeeded in taking the town, thanks to their superior artillery, and forced the garrison to surrender after a week. Charles the Bold took his revenge on them for the ignominy of the declaration of war. The Burgundians let some of the men "learn to fly" from the tower of St. Pierre, as the contemporary chronicle put it. Around four hundred men were drowned in Lake Neuchâtel or were hanged from trees. The Duke brought the rebels to trial which restored his honour and gave stability to his position as Grand Due de l'Occident in the hierarchy of European rulers.37 For their part, the Confederates recognized this as a rejection of their state independence and made "Grandson" their war cry in the Burgundy wars. Revenge came only a few months later at Morat. The giant hedgehog bristling with spikes made by the Confederate infantry overran the Burgundy artillery and was thrown onto Charles the Bold's army which had not yet taken up its position. The Nuremberg humanist Willibald Pirckheimer described the situation as follows: "Die

Eidgenossen verfolgten die Flüchtigen unausgesetzt, und wer von den Reitern niedergeritten ward, wurde von den Fußgängern getötet, so daß es keine Schlacht mehr, sondern nur ein grausam Schlachten gab. Keiner ward, in Erinnerung des früher zugefügten Schmerzes geschont: Edle und Unedle, sämtlich wurden wie das Vieh ohne Unterschied geschlachtet. Viele nämlich bestiegen Schiffe und töteten jene, so sich den Wellen anvertraut,

wie sehr sie auch die Hände emporstreckten und mit Tränen um Mitleid baten, andere schössen die, so Bäume bestiegen hatten, wie Vögel mit ihren Büchsen herunter, noch andere zündeten ganze Häuser an, in welche sich Feinde begeben, so daß man allenthalben Geschray, Geheul, Bitten und Sterbegeröchel vernahm und die Flucht mehr mordete, denn selbst die Schlacht."

Roger Sablonier, "Rittertum, Adel und Kriegswesen im Spätmittelalter", in Das ritterliche Turnier im Spätmittelalter, ed. Josef Fleckenstein (Göttingen, 1985), pp. 554f.; Guy P. Marchai, "Bellum justum contra judicium belli", in Gesellschaft und Gesellschaften. Festschrift zum 65. Geburtstag von Ulrich Im Hof, eds. Nicolai Bernard and Quirinus Reichen (Bern, 1982), p. 118; Peter Blickle, "Kommunalismus. Begriffsbildung in heuristischer Absicht", in Landgemeinde und Stadtgemeinde in Mitteleuropa, ed. Peter Blickle, Historische Zeitschrift suppl. 13 (München, 1991), pp. 5-38; the same, "Friede und Verfassung. Voraussetzungen und Folgen der Eidgenossenschaft von 1291", in Innerschweiz und frühe Eidgenossenschaft. Jubiläumsschrift 700 Jahre Eidgenossenschaft, ed. Historischer Verein der Fünf Orte, red. Hansjakob Achermann, Josef Brüslisauer and Peter Hoppe (Ölten, 1991), pp. 15-63. Pierre Frédérix, La mort de Charles le Téméraire, Trente journées qui ont fait la France (Paris, 1966), p. 127; Schelle, Karl der Kühne (see above, n. 35), p. 212.

68

Bernhard R. Kroener

["The Confederates pursued the fugitives incessantly; whoever was trampled underfoot by the cavalry was killed by the infantry so that it was no longer a battle but a cruel slaughter. Nobody was spared in memory of the pain earlier inflicted: noble and non-noble were slaughtered like cattle without any difference being made. Many boarded ships and killed those who trusted themselves to the waves and stretched out their hands and begged for mercy with tears; others shot down with their guns those who had climbed trees, like birds; still others set fire to houses where there were enemies so that on all sides, screaming, howling, begging and death groans were heard and the escape killed more than even the battle."]38

Here we see a further element of massacre in the early Modern Period: panic, flight and mass killing always occurred together. The conscious annihilation of the opponent began in the moment when he gave up his resistance. If war was understood as a feud, the mass killing of the enemy, which was not necessary for deciding the battle became, so to speak, an atonement and a repayment of a debt. With the victory of the Confederate Gewalthaufen over the Burgundian army, the era of medieval warfare had irrevocably come to an end. These victories had also catapulted the Swiss cantons into the centre of European power politics. Not only could the struggle for supremacy in upper Italy no longer be decided without the Swiss, the Reisläufer also became a top export in the still young era of the infantry. The rapidly expanding European mercenary market promised the cantons fantastic dividends. The freelance soldiers who entered the service of whoever paid the most developed elements of military professionalism,39 a professionalism which elevated wildness, belligerence, courage and uncompromising severity towards the enemy to a trademark which guaranteed the Reisläufers' business. In an early letter from Berne it says: "Wir wollen gern den eren nach das jedermann erstochen und nieman gevangen wer; das wurd allweg den schrecken in unseren finden meren und unser guet lob behalten"

["We

want

enemies and

them all killed and secure our

no

reputation."]

prisoners taken; this will

increase the fear felt

40

For two or three generations, the deliberate killing of the enemy professional competence became characteristic of European warfare. In Willibald

Pirckheimer,

as

the

by

our

proof of 15th and

Der Schweizer Krieg. Mit einer historisch-biographischen Studie, ed. p. 53; Willehad P. Eckert and Christoph von Imhoff, Willibald Pirckheimer. Dürers Freund im Spiegel seines Lebens, seiner Werke und seiner Umwelt (Köln, 1971); Emst Münch, Willibald Pirckheimers Schweizerkrieg und Ehrenhandel mit seinen Feinden zu Nürnberg, nebst Biographie und kritischem Schriftenverzeichnis (Basel, 1826). Hermann Romer, "Reisläuferund Landsknechte. Strukturelemente des Krieges um 1500", in Vom Freiheitskrieg' zum Geschichtsmythos. 500 Jahre Schweizer- oder Schwabenkrieg, eds. Peter Niederhäuser and Werner Fischer (Zürich, 2000), pp. 29-50; Matthias Rogg, Landsknechte und Reisläufer: Bilder vom Soldaten. Ein Stand in der Kunst des 16. Jahrhunderts, Krieg in der Geschichte 5 (Paderborn, 2002). Albert Büchi, Freiburger Missiven zur Geschichte des Burgunderkrieges, number 11, p. 20; Schaufelberger, Der Alte Schweizer (see above, n. 32), p. 179.

Wolfgang Schiel (Berlin, 1988),

69

Antichrist, Archenemy, Disturber of the Peace 16 an

centuries, the advantage in weapons technology or training led, as it does today, to acceleration of the arms race, as each power attempted to overtake their opponents in

technology or tactics. As early as the closing years of the 15th century, the Swiss Reisläufer received competition probably from Burgundian and North-German foot soldiers41 who, distancing themselves from their masters, referred to themselves with massive selfconfidence as "Orden frumber Landsknechte". Wherever these competing military professionals encountered one another in the subsequent decades, massacres aimed at seizing the opponents' market share were the order of the day. In the Swiss War of 1499, the Landsknechtsfähnlein succumbed near Hard, where the Bregenzian Ache flows into Lake Constance, to the threefold onslaught of the Swiss, whom they had previously provoked with lampoons in which they described the Swiss soldiers as Sodomites who "did it" with their cows. The revenge was terrible. Not unlike the at Grandson, the Reisläufer threw their enemies into the bed of the Ache and into Lake Constance. 232 fleeing Swabians were slaughtered in a ditch. Of those who tried to escape across the lake, many were in boats which were overfull and capsized, still near the shore, so they were run through or beaten to death by the pursuing Confederates. 400 lansquenets perished in this way alone.42 The events of Grandson and Hard are as similar as the later description of the end of the Reisläufer in the battles of Bicocca in 1522 and Pavia in 1525.43 As even contemporary chroniclers realized, the massacre of the fleeing enemy lacked any operational necessity. This was a conscious war of annihilation between two professional formations organized on a business basis, whose market value was calculated according to their willingness to pursue the battle to the ultimate extreme. The lansquenets, who surpassed the Swiss Gewalthaufen in the use of handguns and tactical deployment in cooperation with cavalry and artillery, finally replaced the Swiss on the European mercenary market. But it was a dearly-won victory. Only a few decades later they, too, departed from the stage of European warfare and with them disappeared their uncompromising form of warfare.44 In the middle of the 16th century, we find ourselves on the threshold of a new epoch as far as the public perception and acceptance of the previous style of warfare is massacre

Reinhard Baumann, Landsknechte. Ihre Geschichte und Kultur

vom

späten Mittelalter bis

zum

Dreißigjährigen Krieg (München, 1994), pp. 29ff. Reinhard Baumann, Georg von Frundsberg. Der Vater der Landsknechte und Feldhauptmann von Tirol. Eine gesellschaftsgeschichtliche Biographie (München, 1984), pp. 62f. Oswald Fragenstainer, Die Schlacht bei Bicocca, ed. Walter Steinbock, Kleine Studien aus dem Maristenkolleg 6 (Mindelheim, 1973), p. 478; Baumann, Frundsberg (see above, n. 42), pp. 199 and 215. Bernhard R. Kroener, "Vom Landsknecht zum Soldaten. Anmerkungen zu Sozialprestige, Selbstverständnis und Leistungsfähigkeit von Soldaten in den Armeen des 16. Jahrhunderts", in Von Crécy bis Mohâcs: Kriegswesen im späten Mittelalter (1346-1526), XXII Kongress der Internationalen Kommission für Militärgeschichte (Wien, 1997), pp. 79-92.

Bernhard R. Kroener

70

concerned. Now for the first time, interestingly enough from the French-speaking world, we hear the term "massacre" used with negative connotations. A few years later we read of the "massacre de Saint Barthélémy", an event which is referred to in German as "Bartholomäusnacht" and whose cruelty is thus downplayed.45 Almost simultaneously the term "lansquenet" disappeared which had been used also in France to label this European phenomenon of mercenaries. Literati such as Brantôme in a popular literary context coined the phrase "le beau nom de soldat".46 In 1549, Hanns Richter zu Kannburg writes: "Nun bin ich gleichwol im/ain 24 Jar als ain unschuldiger Landtsknecht Krieg nachgezogen... etlich Jar zugebracht alls ain Privat Soldat Fendrich und Haubtmann gegen Geldern und

Frankreich.

"

["I have gone to war as an innocent lansquenet for 24 years...and spent private soldier, sergeant and captain against Geldern and France."]47

many years

as a

The mid 16th century marks a decisive turning point for the development of military society in Europe. Various political, constitutional and economic processes combined and led to a fundamental, if only gradually visible, change in the mental perception of the military potential. The massive deployment of firearms required ever greater numbers of troops who could only be successful in battle through drill and discipline. The maxims of neostoicism influenced the norms of military behaviour and enriched European military theory through the program of the Orange army reform. Feud and war finally parted company.48 This gave rise to the first ius in hello, which later became conventions of war. However, it was only applicable to an opponent who could be accorded the ius ad bellum. To its basic prerequisites belonged the auctoritas principis, the sovereignty of

Philippe Erlanger, La Massacre de la Saint Barthélémy (Paris, 1960), in German: Bartholomäusnacht. Die Pariser Bluthochzeit am 24. August 1572 (München, 1966). André Corvisier, Armées et sociétés en Europe de 1494 à 1789 (Paris, 1976), p. 199; Anne Marie Cocula, "Brantôme: l'homme de guerre au XVIeme siècle face aux guerres de religion", in L'homme de guerre au XVP""1 siècle. Actes du Colloque de l'Association RHR Cannes 1989 (Saint Etienne, 1992), pp. 155-166. Bayr. Staatsbibliothek, München,

cgm 5020

Allerley

Missif

von

Kayser,

Chur und rarsten, fol.

253; Kroener, "Vom Landsknecht zum Soldaten" (see above, n. 44), p. 91, note 50. Gerhard Oestreich, "Der römische Stoizismus und die Oranische Heeresreform", in Geist und Gestalt des fiiihmodernen Staates. Ausgewählte Aufsätze, ed. Gerhard Oestreich (Berlin, 1969), pp. 1-34; Geoffrey Parker, The Military Revolution. Military Innovation and the Rise of the West 15001800 (Cambridge, 1988), in German: Die militärische Revolution. Die Kriegskunst und der Aufstieg des Westens (Frankfurt, 1990); David Eltis, The Military Revolution in Sixteenth Century Europe (London, 1995); Wolfgang Reinhard, "Humanismus und Militarismus, Antike-Rezeption und Kriegshandwerk in der Oranischen Heeresreform", in Krieg und Frieden im Horizont des für DFG-Kommission ed. Josef Franz Worstbrock, Renaissancehumanismus, 12 185 204. 1986), pp. Humanismusforschung, Mitteilung (Weinheini, -

Antichrist, Archenemy, Disturber of the Peace

71

prince, which was expressed not least in the ability to marshal and maintain hired and, ideally, regularly-paid troops, that is, soldiers.49 Conflicts within a state were therefore still regarded as illegitimate. In these cases, the traditional feud-law concepts of punishment and atonement still applied. While massacres were regarded as reprehensible in conflicts between states, since the rights of both parties to wage ware were recognized, it was still permissible against rebels. By the legal concepts of the Early Modern Period, the behaviour of subjects who had risen up against their overlord by force of arms fulfilled the definition of high treason, a crime so serious that it could only be punished with ignominious death. The German Peasants' War, the wars of religion in France, the punitive expeditions of the Duke of Alba in the Netherlands and the English Civil War prove this point eloquently.50 Nevertheless there can be no doubt that even in the 17th and 18th centuries ordered massacres and emotionally-charged acts of military violence took place even in the

conflicts between states. As warfare became more and more a matter of state, the soldier took on the quality of a resource of arms. The annihilation of the enemy in the course of a pursuit necessarily led to an unwelcome slackening of discipline among one's own soldiers. Thus already during the Thirty Years' War, it gradually became

Steiger, s. v. "Völkerrecht", in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe (see above, n. 29), vol. 7 (Stuttgart, 1992), pp. 97-140; Michael Behnen, "Der gerechte und der notwendige Krieg. 'Nécessitas' und 'Utilitas Rei publicae' in der Kriegstheorie des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts", in Staatsverfassung und Heeresverfassung in der europäischen Geschichte der Frühen Neuzeit, ed. Johannes Kunisch (Berlin, 1986), pp. 43-106. Horst Buszello, Peter Blickle, Rudolf Enders, eds., Der deutsche Bauernkrieg, 3rd ed. (Paderborn, 1995). Horst Carl, "Der Schwäbische Bund", in Der Bauernkrieg in Oberschwaben, ed. Elmar L. Kuhn (Tübingen, 2000), pp. 421-444, here pp. 436f.; Denis Crouzet, "Die Gewalt zur Zeit der Religionskriege im Frankreich des 16. Jahrhunderts", in Physische Gewalt (see above, n. 11), eds. Lindenberger and Lüdtke, pp. 78-105; the same, Les guerriers de Dieu, la violence au temps des troubles de religion 1525-1610, 2 vols. (Paris, 1990); Jacques Gâches, Mémoires de Jacques Gâches sur les guerres de religion à Castres et dans le Languedoc 1555-1610, ed. Charles Pradel (Paris, 1879); Jane Susannah Fishman, Boerenverdriet. Violence between Peasants and Soldiers in Early Modern Netherlands Art (Ann Arbor, 1982), pp. 19-31; Jonathan Israel, The Dutch Republic. Its Rise, Greatness and Fall 1477-1806, Oxford History of Early Modern Europe (Oxford, 1995), Heinhard

155-168; Horst Lademacher, Die Niederlande. Politische Kultur zwischen Individualität und Anpassung (Frankfurt/Main, 1993), pp. 102-111; Geoffrey Parker, Der Aufstand der Niederlande. pp.

Von der Herrschaft der Spanler zur Gründung der Niederländischen Republik 1549-1609 (München, 1979), p. 127; Gerald E. Aylmer, The King's Servants. The Civil Service of Charles I. 1625-1642 (London, 1973); Barbara Donagan, "Atrocity, War Crime and Treason in the English Civil War", The American Historical Review 99 (1994), 4, pp. 1137-1166, here pp. 1149 and 1152; Christopher Hill, God's Englishmen: Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution (London, 1970), p. 177; Hans-Christoph Schröder, Die Revolutionen Englands im 17. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt/Main, 1986), pp. 169, 174. The incidents described here refer to the unrest in Ireland. It appears characteristic that Cromwell, who on the 12th September, 1649 caused nearly 3000 defenders of Drogheda to be butchered, regarded the population of Ireland as barbarians, as, incidentally did many of his

compatriots.

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usual to regard a battle as won when the enemy fled and the battlefield had been maintained. Besides, the traditional promise of booty meant that when troops reached the enemy camp, they recompensed themselves for the hardships of battle by plunder. Under these circumstances a well-ordered pursuit was out of the question, especially when darkness was falling.51 The flexibility of the European mercenary, which meant that it was easy to reemploy captured enemy soldiers among one's own troops, made the mass slaughter of prisoners seem less and less sensible.52 Nevertheless, even at the end of the 16th century, large-scale executions of captives were still conducted inter alia for reasons of state politics. The English governor on the Irish coast had the sailors of the Spanish Armada, who had been driven ashore in large numbers, meticulously registered by their fellow prisoners before he had them killed, apparently on orders from London, where it was feared that the indigenous population might conspire with them. In this case, political calculation and specific military considerations mingled with massive negative religious stereotypes.53 The massacre of prisoners often took place when there were shortages of provisions or when the troops guarding the prisoners were in a critical operational situation. This measure avoided the problem of having to feed captives who were only a hindrance on the march. This motive is common in 17th century reports of the killing of wounded soldiers. Since medical supplies were catastrophically short, even for one's own soldiers, they certainly were not going to be wasted on the sick and injured of the enemy, who had obviously lost their usefulness as military human resources. In keeping with the mercenary tradition of the previous era, the philosophy of war in the 17th century regarded soldiers in the first instance as a commodity, as militarily-useful raw material, which at best could be acquired, at worst had to be destroyed, because it had become worthless or threatened to be dangerous.54 In this context we should point to another target group of war massacres in the 17th century, whose fate seems similar to the comparable manifestations in the 20th century, 51

52

The Swedish reports of Battle of Breitenfeld in 1631 are read in this spirit: Michael Roberts, Gustavus Adolphus. A History of Sweden 1611-1632, 2 vols. (London, 1958), vol. 2, pp. 536f; Hellmut Diwald, Wallenstein. Biographie, 3rd ed. (Esslingen, 1984), pp. 352f. In the later course of the Thirty Years' War, the picture changed, thanks to a major strengthening of the cavalry and, thereby an increased mobility of the units. Geoffrey Parker, Der Dreißigjährige Krieg (Frankfurt/Main, 1987), pp. 294f. Bernhard R. Kroener, "Der Soldat als Ware. Kriegsgefangenenschicksale im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert", in Krieg und Frieden im Übergang vom Mittelalter zur Neuzeit. Theorie Praxis Bilder, ed. Heinz Duchhardt and Patrice Veit (Mainz, 2000), pp. 271-296. Armada 1588-1988, an international exhibition to commemorate the Spanish Armada (London, 1988), p. 268. List of executed Armada survivors December 1588, PRO, London SP63/139,2,1. Kroener, "Der Soldat als Ware" (see above, n. 52), p. 281; Daniel Höhrath, "Tn Cartellen wird der Wert eines Gefangenen bestimmet.' Kriegsgefangenschaft als Teil der Kriegspraxis des Ancien Régime", in In der Hand des Feindes. Kriegsgefangenschaft von der Antike bis zum Zweiten Weltkrieg, ed. Rüdiger Overmans (Köln, 1999), pp. 141-170. -

53

54

-

Antichrist, Archenemy, Disturber of the Peace

73

namely the mass killing of members of a particular ethnic group whose incorporation into existing bodies of troops was regarded as difficult or impossible. Thus, soldiers from south-east Europe who had served in the Habsburg regiments on the so-called military border against the Ottoman Empire and were later deployed on the central European military stage were described indiscriminately as Croats. The conflict with the Turks which lasted for generations allowed battle against every opponent with uncompromising severity. As ethnic and cultural foreigners, they could expect no leniency if captured. If they were not killed on the battlefield, they were forced to work in local mines, as, for instance, the Swedish government practised, a hard labour which hardly any of these soldiers survived.55 There, where the population did not know what the label "Croats" meant, the authorities used well-known negative stereotypes with ethnic connotations to illustrate how dangerous these fighters potentially were. Thus, the Governor of Duke Friedrich Ulrich of BraunschweigWolfenbüttel wrote on 27th September, 1625 to his sovereign: "Um Blankenburg herum lassen sich viel Zigeuner bei unterschiedlichen Partien zu zehn und fünfzehn Mann sehen, über die Maßen wohl bewehrt, mit zwei langen Röhren ein jeder und die Weiber zu Pferd und ein paar Pistolen im Sattel, sie ziehen durch ungebahnte Wege, halten sich in Gehölzen und Vorbüschen, kundschaften nach allen Dingen fleißig, also daß zu besorgen, sie in des Wallensteins Bestallung auf Verräterei, Raub, Mord und Brand ausgeschickt sein mögen."

["Around Blankenburg many gypsies in groups of ten to fifteen men can be seen, well armed beyond measure, each with two long poles, the women on horseback and some pistols in the saddle, they pass through uncleared ways, stick to undergrowth and shrubberies, diligently reconnoitre everything, doing what they have been appointed for by Wallenstein, i.e. treason, pillaging, murder and arson."]56 The term "gypsies" is used here as a blanket term for cultural foreigners, who excluded themselves by their behaviour, clothing and language and who, in the understanding of the time were to be met with suspicion, rejection and violent persecution. It was, after all, believed that they were capable of all kinds of disgraceful deeds from treason to murder. The "gypsy-advance guard" of the Wallenstein army, which the warrantor of a protestant prince had warned his master about, can with some certainty be identified as a unit of light cavalry under the colonel Isolani, consisting mainly of Croats or Hungarians. Even if the Croats as catholics had been still Christians, these mitigating circumstances in the Turkish wars of the 17th century were completely lacking regarding the Ottoman warriors. Kroener, "Der Soldat als Ware" (see above, n. 52), p. 285. Diwald, Wallenstein (see above, n. 51), p. 334; it is true that during the Thirty Years' War gypsies may have enlisted in the armies; however it can be assumed that these were mostly mercenaries from the military border areas in the Balkans, particularly since a short time later the term "Tartars" is used. Peter Burschel, Söldner im Nordwestdeutschland des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts.

Sozialgeschichtliche Studien (Göttingen, 1994), pp. 90f.

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Bernhard R. Kroener

stick for the moment to the Thirty Years' War. The collective experiences of this war created interpretative patterns which endured far beyond the peace agreement. The collective memory determined for decades the cultural dimension of political and military strategies. It can therefore be assumed that certain elements of warfare from the Thirty Years' War ceased to exist only when that generation had died out whose elite had been influenced by them. The endurance and the effects of certain traumatically internalized negative stereotypes of this war have not yet been sufficiently examined in modem military history. We know when peace was concluded; but we can scarcely guess when the war ended in the people's heads.57 In the context of our question, let me cite a little known example: Sweden, the overstrained great power in the 17th century, could only keep its oversized fighting forces armed with the help of French subsidies. In his war against the United Provinces, Louis XIV used his Swedish ally as a strategic diversion in eastern central Europe. Using French money, an army was recruited in 1673/74 in Swedish Pomerania; however, the crown of Sweden soon lacked the means to keep it going. Because the troops had the task of threatening the electorate of Brandenburg in order to hinder the elector's military engagement for the Orange forces, Stockholm, in view of an acute crisis of supplies in the winter of 1674, decided with all the arrogance of a great power, to quarter the army in neighbouring Brandenburg. The electoral government was notified that the action was not regarded as a war measure. Hence there was no declaration of war. In 1674, they still treated the neighbouring state as they had been used to do during its neutrality in the Thirty Years' War.58 The inhabitants of the border districts of Uckermark and Prignitz were reminded by the Swedish occupation of a time of war when they had lost more than two-thirds of their population and which had ended scarcely more than a generation ago. With the term "der Schwede kommt" the Swede is coming internalized negative stereotypes of past warfare were revived as a portent of the future for the majority of the population. This treatment reminded the elector of the rule of his father, when the electorate had been a helpless plaything of the powers. Let

us

-

-

theory of an experiential history of war: Nikolaus Buschmann and Horst Carl, eds., Die Erfahrung des Krieges. Erfahrungsgeschichdiche Perspektiven von der Französischen Revolution bis zum Zweiten Weltkrieg, Krieg in der Geschichte 9 (Paderborn, 2001); Matthias Asche and Anton Schindling, eds., Das Strafgericht Gottes. Kriegsetfahrungen und Religion im Heiligen Römischen Reich Deutscher Nation im Zeitalter des Dreißigjährigen Krieges (Münster, 2001); Hans Medick, "Historisches Ereignis und zeitgenössische Erfahrung: Die Eroberung und Zerstörung Magdeburgs 1631 ", in Zwischen Alltag und Katastrophe. Der Dreißigjährige Krieg aus der Nähe, eds. Benigna von Krusenstjern and Hans Medick (Göttingen, 1999), pp. 377-408. Ludwig Hüttl, Friedrich Wilhelm von Brandenburg, der Große Kurfürst. 1620-1688. Eine politische Biographie (München, 1981), pp. 406f; Emst Opgenoorth, Friedrich Wilhelm. Der Große Kurfürst von Brandenburg, 2 vols., Göttingen 1971-1978, pp. 162-164. On the

Antichrist, Archenemy, Disturber of the Peace

75

In this

instance, the individual experience of the ruler combined with the collective of the people. The prince and his officials used the collective memory of the memory to population mobilise anti-Swedish attitudes which made the brutality of the events in this war possible in the first place. On 20th May, 1675, an order of Frederick William's went out from Cleves to his governor in the March that the bäuerliche Landfahne should be mobilized and equipped and urged to "allen

Schweden, wo sie solche bekommen können, die Hälse entzwei zu schlagen."

["break the necks of all Swedes where they can get them."]59 Each school child in the German Empire knew the story of the fast march of the Brandenburg army, which from its quarters in Franconia hurried to the river Rhin near Fehrbellin, where the Brandenburg cavalry annihilated their Swedish masters in a cavalry battle in the style of the Thirty Years' War. What is mostly added to the tales of heroes without comment illuminates the true character of this meeting: the battle statistics of both sides show that 8000 Swedes opposed barely 7000 Brandenburgers. Less than half of the Swedish troops were able to cross the Rhin to safety the day after the battle. More than 2400 Swedish soldiers fell; only 400 are said to have been taken prisoner by the Brandenburgers.60 The elector, on the other hand, had only lost about 500 of his troops. Such figures from a time before statistics were used can be seen as problematic and perhaps among those registered as fallen were some deserters and scattered troops. Nevertheless, the relation of the losses is thought-provoking. The elector himself answered the question connected to this in a letter to the prince of Anhalt-Dessau. On the evening of the battle, he noted, among other things "... 8 fahnen 2 estandarten und ein stück habe ich bekommen, was fur gefangene weiß ich noch nicht weill wenig quartier gegeben worden. Der feindt hat vieil Volck und turnehme offizier verlohren..."

["I have got 8 flags 2 standards and a piece of artillery; what kind of prisoners I don't know yet, because little quarter was given. The enemy lost many people and leading officers..."]61 The names of individual Swedish officers follow. The Swedish army department which consisted of more infantry than cavalry was literally butchered by the Brandenburg cavalry as they fled to the bridges near Fehrbellin.

Klinkenborg, ed., Fehrbellin. Nach Berichten und Briefen der führenden Männer, Voigtländers Quellenbücher 30 (Leipzig, without year), pp. 42f. Frank Bauer, Fehrbellin 1675. Brandenburg-Preußens Aufbruch zur Großmacht (Potsdam, 1998), Melle

p. 131. Letter of the "Kurfürst" to his Governor Prince Johann Klinkenborg, Fehrbellin (see above, n. 59), p. 73.

Georg

of Anhalt-Dessau, 18 June 1675,

76

Bernhard R. Kroener An enemy

war

made

a

propaganda which deliberately operated using the memory of the previous type of warfare, which had been last practised in the Thirty Years' War,

reality at Fehrbellin.62 The fact that in the middle of the seventies the leaders who were socialized during the Thirty Years' War fought their last military battles may also have played a role. At Fehrbellin Carl Gustav Wrangel on the Swedish side confronted Georg Derfflinger on the Brandenburg side. The presence of the Thirty Years' War is also recognisable in the picture topoi of the contemporary propaganda. In the Dutch war the templates of the Thirty Years' War were taken up once more as, for instance the picture sequences by Romeyn de Hooghe vividly show when compared to those of Jacques Callot.63 In the Uckermark these templates appear once again in the light of the Swedish threat of 1756.64 The interaction between picture propaganda and massacre depict an exciting area of our subject matter, an analysis of which, however, would be beyond the scope of this essay. At Fehrbellin the fears of the past were consciously and unconsciously used for annihilating an opponent who could not be regarded as "other" either ethnically, in terms of civilisation, or in terms of religious confession. In this respect, the Turkish wars at the end of the 17th century demonstrate a quite different type of motivation. In this case, a transcultural war of extermination which appeared atavistic in its killing rituals was waged on both sides with unimaginable brutality. At first a massive Turkophobia heightened by the Ottoman army invading as far as Vienna was increased further by church propaganda which recognized the Turk as the archenemy of Christianity. Therefore the Christian fighters regarded their victory in the battles of Senta or Slankamen and Petrovaradin as God's judgment which entitled them to enforce the Last Judgement already on earth.65 once more

The government of the electorate made deliberate use of figures of speech in its proclamations that were to be read from the pulpits and should trigger the population's memory of the Thirty Years' War: Johann Georg Fürst von Anhalt, gedrucktes Mandat, 20 Mai 1675, Dorsalvermerk: "verlesen Domin. Trinitat. 30. May" The author possesses this document. Martin Knauer, "Bedenke das Ende". Zur Funkdon der Todesmahnung in druckgraphischen Folgen des Dreißigjährigen Krieges (Tübingen, 1997); Wolfgang Cilleßen, ed., Krieg der Bilder. Druckgraphik als Medium politischer Auseinandersetzung im Europa des Absolutismus (Ausstellungskatalog des Deutschen Historischen Museums) (Berlin, 1997), p. 138; Abraham des Wicquefort, Advis aux véritables hollondois (without place, 1673). G. B. Götz, Elend des Krieges, Kupferstich 21x 34 cm. (1756), Berlin Staatsbibliothek, PK (YB 6759 kl.), Museumsverband des Landes Brandenburg, ed., Ortstermine, Stationen BrandenburgPreußens auf dem Weg in die moderne Welt, Teil der gemeinsamen Landesausstellung Berlin und Brandenburg Preußen 2001 (Berlin, 2001), p. 74 (Militär). Maximilian Grothaus, "Zum Türkenbild in der Adels- und Volkskultur der Habsburgermonarchie von 1650 -1800", in Das Osmanische Reich und Europa 1683 bis 1789: Konflikt, Entspannung, Austausch, eds. Gernot Heiss and Grete Klingenstein, Wiener Beiträge zur Geschichte der Neuzeit 10 (München, 1983), pp. 63-88; On an important source of folk culture in a society where barely -

Antichrist, Archenemy, Disturber of the Peace

77

At Senta for instance the Turkish infantry was covering the cavalry's and artillery's crossing to the opposite bank of the Danube and was surrounded by the imperial regiments in a semi-circle, crowded together in the narrowest possible space and quite literally crushed. The Viziers of Adana, Anatolia and Bosnia and 25 to 30 000 Ottoman officers and soldiers as well as the Grand Vizier Elmas Mohammed Pascha fell victim to the frenzy of the Christian soldiers. By contrast, Prince Eugene only lost 28 officers and around 400 men.66 After the battle of Petrovaradin in 1716 an imperial officer wrote in his diary with a markedly critical undertone: "Wir haben nicht mehr als zwanzig Gefangene bekommen, indem blutgierig waren und Alles massacriert haben."

["we have not taken more than twenty and massacred everyone."]67

unsere

Leute viel

zu

prisoners, because our people were far too bloodthirsty

Although the Sublime Porte had been a full member of the European powers for a long time, the power politics-oriented expansionist policy against the Ottoman state had disastrous effects in its irrational and anachronistic force. In the fight against "die barbarische Nation", "the barbaric nation" as Eugene himself described it, the motive of a religiously-inspired Reconquista together with a feeling of having a superior civilisation formed a powerful motivation; this had substituted the fear of the "other". Ethnically, religious negative stereotypes in the second half of the 17th century and at the beginning of the 18th century still were the starting point for an aggressive waging of war against an opponent whose foreignness reduced the inhibition threshold for mass killing. Because he was not counted as part of one's own cultural circle, it was not difficult to deny him humanity. In the same spirit, but even more so because of the roughness of the land and the small number of forces on their own side, the Swedish-Polish conflict in the 1650s developed into a demographic catastrophe for the Polish state. In the collective consciousness of the population this war is still today registered as "the great flood".68 At the start of the 18th century a third phase of warfare began in which the frequency of massacres tailed off markedly. The wars of the 18th century appear at first glance to

10 percent were literate: Bertrand M. Buchmann, Türkenlieder. Zu den Türkenkriegen und besonders zur zweiten Wiener Türkenbelagerung (Wien, 1983). Max Braubach, Prinz Eugen von Savoyen. Eine Biographie, 5 vols. (München, 1963-1965), vol. 1, p. 260. Bernhard R. Kroener, "Prinz Eugen und die Türken", in Prinz Eugen, ed. Johannes Kunisch (Freiburg, 1986), pp. 113-125, here, p. 122; Derek McKay, Prinz Eugen von Savoyen. Feldherr dreier Kaiser (Graz, 1979), pp. 43f. Gotthold Rhode, "Polen-Litauen vom Ende der Verbindung mit Ungarn bis zum Ende der Vasas (1444-1669)", in Handbuch der Europäischen Geschichte, ed. Theodor Schieder, 7 vols. (Stuttgart, 1971-1987), vol. 3 (1971), p. 1051; Steward P. Oakley, War and Peace in the Baltic 1560-1790 (London, 1992), pp. 84f.; David Kirby, Northern Europe in the Early Modern Period. The Baltic World 1492-1772 (London, 1990), pp. 183ff.

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Bernhard R. Kroener

be marked by an increasingly sensible enlightened rationality. They brought about a regularity in the conduct of operations, which did not stop the intensity in which war was waged but led to a decline of deeds carried out in a frenzy and to a reduction of

excesses.69

The dark side of the Enlightenment, a coolly rational power policy which degraded men to objects who had to fulfd their functions in the clockwork of the rulers' practice, did not leave military excessive deeds to chance but used them as deliberately dosed instruments of a power technique. Up to the beginning of the 19th century, international war conventions sanctioned the traditional rule that a fortress which, despite multiple demands, had not surrendered, would be given to the troops to plunder after it had been taken by storm. The fact that in such a situation excessive deeds were carried out against the civilian population as well as the military was generally accepted with approval; the soldiers would not otherwise be encouraged to attack. But it should not be overlooked that this practice was used very seldom in the 18th century. However, the threat of appropriate measures was part of the ritual of negotiating terms of surrender.70 Under particular conditions the enemy himself was still threatened with massacre in the Seven Years' War. Thus, the Prussian officer Christian Wilhelm von Prittwitz reported on the battle of Zorndorf in 1758: "Während des Marsches, wo wir in gehöriger Entfernung die Front und die rechte Flanke des Feindes umgingen, um in den Rücken zu kommen, ließ der König durch seinen Adjutanten auf verblümte Weise sagen, sie sollten die Eier zu vernichten suchen, damit keine Jungen daraus hervorgehen könnten, welches mit deutlicherem Worte ausgesprochen soviel besagen sollte, als: gebt keinen Pardon, welcher strenge Befehl beinahe die Veranlassung geworden wäre, daß wir die Bataille verloren hätten. Denn die Russen wurden nun durch unser Manöver auf allen Seiten dermaßen eingeengt, daß sie entweder das Gewehr strecken oder sich durch unsere Linien durchschlagen mußten, weil schlechterdings kein Rückzug fur sie übrig blieb."

["During the march when we went round to the front and to the right flank of the enemy with the necessary distance in order to approach from behind, the King had his adjutants say obliquely that they should attempt to destroy the eggs, so that no young could come out; we understood this to mean in plain words: give no pardon. This strict command nearly caused us to lose the battle. Because the Russians were so hemmed on all sides by our manoevres that they either had to surrender or to break through our lines because it was simply not possible for them to retreat."]71

w

70

Jeremy Black, European Warfare 1660-1815 (London, 1994), pp. 35f. Daniel Höhrath, "Der Bürger im Krieg der Fürsten. Stadtbewohner und Soldaten in belagerten Städten um die Mitte des 18. Jahrhunderts", in Krieg und Frieden. Militär und Gesellschaft in der Frühen Neuzeit, eds. Bernhard R. Kroener and Ralf Pröve (Paderborn, 1996), pp. 305-330, here p. 327.

71

Christian Wilhelm

Prittwitz, "Ich bin ein Preuße... Jugend und Kriegsleben eines im preußischen Offiziers Siebenjährigen Krieg, Quellen und Schriften zur Militärgeschichte 2 (Breslau, 1935, reprint Paderborn, 1989), pp. 91f. von

"

Antichrist, Archenemy, Disturber of the Peace

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After the partial occupation of East Prussia, when the Prussian subjects rather happily bowed down to the Russian administration, it seemed appropriate to the king to attach the label "barbaric" to his opponent. This meant that the Russian soldiers lost the status of equal combatants. The older prejudicial stereotype according to which the Russian empire had only been civilized on the surface, in the course of the Seven Years' War led to a significantly poorer treatment of Russian prisoners of war, who rebelled against their lot in Prussian captivity and whose rebellions were repeatedly put down bloodily.72 In the topos of the barbaric nation the ambivalent relationship to the perception of the "other", which is typical of the Enlightenment, is revealed, benevolent curiousity could suddenly be changed into unrestrained aggression, in which different behaviour was denounced as backward in terms of civilisation. Against this threat to European behaviour a policy of extinction was sufficiently legitimized. This action can be observed for instance in the quashing of the Scottish rebellion at the battle of Culloden Moor in 1745, where the danger to the dynastic legitimacy and traditional confessional differences additionally intensified the conflict. With the era of the Seven Years' War we have arrived once again in the time from where I selected the example cited at the beginning. Cultural difference, a specifically different perception of the "other", but also the clash of culturally different ritualisations of war, determined the picture in the Indian and north American theatre of war. For the Indian warriors, being taken captive was a greater ignominy than death, but also for the victors additional strength was gained only by the death of the opponent. These ideas seem strangely familiar from the behaviour of Japanese soldiers in the Second World War, which, however, according to the rules of the European Ancien Régime could not be justified.

Summary The term 'massacre', as an illegal act against an opponent who has no opportunity to defend himself on equal terms, dates from the middle of the 16th century when feuds and wars were finally separated from each other. Alongside an increasing nationalisation of the military, the international law developed, conferring the right to wage war on each sovereign state. Mass armies and a regulated implementation of weapons required a check on the emotions, which was strengthened even more by the programme of religious ethic. Accordingly, massacre was only allowed when the opponent did not have the status of an equal combatant. This applied in the first instance to opponents in civil wars, rebellions and confessional conflicts which R. Kroener, "Die materiellen Grundlagen österreichischer und preußischer Rriegsanstrengungen 1756-1763", in Europa im Zeitalter Friedrichs des Großen. Wirtschaft, Gesellschaft, Kriege, ed. Bernhard R. Kroener, Beiträge zur Militärgeschichte 26 (München, 1989),

Bernhard

pp.

47-78, here p. 56.

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outlawed them, because they had offended God's order. In view of an extensive consolidation of the inner state relationships in Europe from the second half of the 17th century, foreigners and opponents who were not regarded as equal in terms of European civilisation were increasingly subjected to massacre (Croats, Turks, Tartars, PolishUkrainian Ulanski). Even more than a generation after the Thirty Years' War the collectively represented war scenarios, which were traumatically internalized, were instrumentalized for the conduct of wars. The perception of war in the past received a normative character for coping with the present. Under particular conditions the Franco-Dutch war gives clear evidence for this even in its pictorial propaganda the excessive acts of this war meant a form of representing and overcoming the past. A reduction of the threat from its borders to the heart of Europe led, under the conditions of enlightened rationalism, to a regulation of the conduct of war in the 18th century, a regulation which ultimately even included the Ottomans. However, massacre could be threatened or even ordered as part of the sensible calculation of power by the political-military leaders, in order to demoralise the enemy or to encourage the ability to attack and the superiority of one's own troops. Under particular conditions, opponents who had been denounced as barbarians could be subject to massacres because they could in any case be blamed to have broken the rules of engagement. Deeds of frenzy against fleeing enemies remained outside of this consideration. They were continually present in all wars of the Early Modem Period. Even contemporaries recognized in "canon fever" the motivation for these deeds. According to more recent findings, it may have been psychogenic tensions as a consquence of fear of death which were released like a cataract by the sight of the enemy taking to flight and which led to the psychic release of inhibitions, as a consequence of which frequently uncontrolled acts of excess occurred. Death in battle generally occurs in the balanced situation of kill or be killed. Its prerequisite lies in the respect for the opponent to whom the norms of ius in hello are -

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applied. Behind the massacre stands an idea of humanity which regards the enemy as inferior and denies him the right to live under conditions of war. The enemy is felt to be an existential threat to one's own identity. By placing the opponent outside the rule of law which applies to oneself, one was justified in setting aside the norms of war conventions. The frequently-occurring justification of wanting to fight him with his own weapons means nothing else than calling a crime what one wants to destroy using criminal means. When massacre was stylised as a punitive expedition or a fight against the enemy of mankind, murder ultimately becomes ennobled as heroism.

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IV. intensity of massacres in war is closely connected to the respective contemporary understanding of the adversary as enemy and gives a key to the development of a typology of war in the Early Modern Period. Legitimacy of war and the image of enemy are connected and together form the ethical basis of the form of war. Thus for the era between the 15th and 19th century, a two-tier development can be seen according to which the subcultural is followed by the intracultural war; while changes to transcultural war under particular conditions apply to both phases. The typological triad of different cultures of war corresponds noticeably to the threefold definition of enemy as developed by Carl Schmitt in his work "Der Begriff des Politischen". For Schmitt, political actions and motives are based on a constitutive polarity between friend and enemy, whereby he believes he can distinguish between three types of enemy: the conventional, the actual, and, finally, the absolute enemy.73 If we apply these categories to the various concepts of enemy as we come across them in the conflicts of the Early Modem Period, and here not only in the phenomenon of war massacre, then, with an eye on the different cultural shaping of war the following can The

be determined: The intracultural war, the war against a conventional enemy, is in the first instance characterized by a practice of war which mainly follows the rules. The common basis of legitimacy, the ius ad bellum, creates the requirement to submit the military action to a relevant codification, the ius in bello. A common cultural foundation of meaning does allow the opponent to appear at times as the destroyer of the peace, but does not mark him out as an enemy who would be shut out aggressively.74 The intracultural war depicts the adequate form of action in European national positioning wars as they have been waged since the Peace of Westphalia in 1648.75 The mutual legitimizing by the warring factions formed the requirements for a conflict

Schmitt, Der Begriff des Politischen. Text von 1932 mit einem Vorwort und drei Corollarien (Berlin, 1963), p. 17. All inter-state wars of the European state system after the Peace of Westphalia belong to this context, in which the ius ad bellum was extended by a more-or-less binding ius in bello. Ekkehart Krippendorf, Staat und Krieg. Die historische Logik politischer Unvernunft (Frankfurt/Main, 1985); Krippendorfs pointed theses launched an intensive discussion in the course of which problem areas where there is a lack of research on the early modem formation of states have been indicated Burkhardt, "Friedlosigkeit" (see above, n. 19), pp. 513f. Bernhard R. Kroener, "Herrschaftsverdichtung als Kriegsursache. Wirtschaft und Rüstung der europäischen Großmächte im Siebenjährigen Krieg", in Wie Kriege entstehen. Zum historischen Hintergrund von Staatenkonflikten, ed. Bernd Wegner, Krieg in der Geschichte 4 (Paderborn, 2000), pp. 145-174; Johannes Burkhardt, "Vom Debakel zum Mirakel. Zur friedensgeschichtlichen Einordnung des Siebenjährigen Krieges", in Menschen und Strukturen in der Geschichte Alteuropas. Festschriftfür Johannes Kunisch zur Vollendung seines 65. Lebensjahres, eds. Helmut Neuhaus and Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger, Historische Forschungen 73 (Berlin, 2002), pp. 299-318. Carl

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between states. They created the basis for an increasing limitation on military violence. To achieve this limitation, a successfully completed monopolizing of means of war in the hands of the early modem states legitimized under international law was needed. Overcoming intracultural conflict therefore urgently requires a compression of power within the state, by which a purposeful disciplining of the military apparatus is achieved. The contemporary term of the tamed Bellona designates more the idealtypical projection of an enlightened theory of war rather than the reality of war in the 18th century as the examples cited show. It would be perhaps more apt to talk of the "regulated Bellona" but this would deminuate the metaphor's attraction.76 Chronologically, this form of war occurs at the same time as the development of ius publicum europaeum, that is within the period of the second half of the 17th century up to the early years of the French revolution. Transcultural war forms the counterpart to this: It is characterized by excluding the opponent not only from the common legal basis but even from the common cultural basis. In these conflicts the opponent becomes the absolute enemy. The ethnic-religious connotation of archenemy produces a concept of enemy which marks the adversaries as opponents of humanity. Cultural otherness, not seldom in combination with a religious point of reference on the periphery of or outside Christian convictions, promoted irrational fear, which could harden into wars of extermination. War massacres belong to the manifestations of transcultural wars. A war propaganda oriented on religious convictions and prejudicial stereotypes with ethnic and cultural connotations frequently serves to promote and legitimize an intention to exterminate the other. Extremely diverging accounts of the losses of the waning parties exist even in the period before statistical methods were in use.77 Transcultural wars took place on the European periphery in the south-east and east of the continent and were characteristic of the early colonial expansion wars. The example of transcultural wars allows the phenomenon of simultaneity of the non-simultaneous to be presented particularly clearly. On the horizon of the European Enlightenment, cultural exclusion was practised with differing intensity in European states, depending on the persistence of older negative stereotypes. But the example of the Ottoman Empire in the late 18th century also allows us to trace the development from preceding exclusion to political-cultural inclusion.

Johannes Kunisch, "Von der gezähmten zur entfesselten Bellona. Die Umwertung des Krieges im Zeitalter der Revolutions- und Freiheitskriege", in Fürst, Gesellschaft, Krieg. Studien zur bellizistischen Disposition des absoluten Fürstenstaates, ed. Johannes Kunisch (Köln, 1992), pp. 203-226. Guido Komatsu, "Die Türkei und das europäische Staatensystem im 16. Jahrhundert. Untersuchungen zu Theorie und Praxis des frühneuzeitlichen Völkerrechts", in Recht und Reich im Zeitalter der Reformation. Festschrift für Horst Rabe, ed. Christine Roll (Frankfurt/Main, 1996), pp. 121-144: Kroener, "Prinz Eugen" (see above, n. 67), pp. 113-125.

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Between intracultural and transcultural war, subcultural war is finally established. This in contrast to intracultural state war, depicts the prevailing manifestation of the wars of European state formation from the 15th to 17th century. The adversary was not yet regarded as an opponent but as a real enemy. The affiliation to the common cultural basis could be abolished by exclusion from a common basis of law and value system. Under this condition individual subcultural conflicts acquired the character of transcultural clashes. The difference between cultural and legal basis is however not a compelling requirement in every case.78 In view of diverging and competing confessional convictions, the propaganda battle term "Antichrist" might still be used. However, there was no binding proclamation of a heretical war after the conclusion of the Hussite wars in Christian Europe. Referring to the circumstances of the Early Modem Period, subcultural war does not necessarily belong to the forms of transcultural conflict. In these conflicts at least one of the adversaries was generally not awarded ius ad bellum. The war was in consequence illegitimate and threatened thereby a recognized political order of society. In certain circumstances the non-recognition of the right to wage war could be understood as a threat to break the system of existing power hierarchies and social circumstances which were regarded as objectively valid. The resulting breaking of norms could often only be healed by exterminating the

opponent.

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Because ius in bello was not used in these conflicts, the military massacre was here, too, the decisive means to obliterate those who had offended the order of salvation. Massacre occured therefore not as spontaneous behaviour by undisciplined warriors, but was rather consciously deployed as an instrument of waging war.

The corporately-oriented efforts of state formation by the United Provinces on the one side and the Bohemian states on the other show that the ideology of extermination never really became effective here. Specific stereotypes of fear and defence were however particularly virulent in the German Peasant War. Massacres were rather the rule in this conflict although it can to some extent be determined that the mass losses of the peasant hordes were often the result of panic reactions. Parker, Aufstand der Niederlande (see above, n. 50); Jonathan Irvine Israel, The Dutch Republic and the Hispanic World 1606-1661 (Oxford, 1982); Joachim Bahlke, "Durch 'starke Konföderation wohl stabilisiert'. Ständische Defension und politisches Denken in der habsburgischen Ländergruppe am Anfang des 17. Jahrhunderts", in Kontakte und Konflikte. Böhmen, Mähren und Österreich. Aspekte eines Jahrtausends gemeinsamer Geschichte, ed. Thomas Winkelbauer (Waldhofen an der Taya, 1993), pp. 174-186. The history of the German Peasant War as well as the religious wars in France and the English Revolution produce a quantity of weighty examples. For the Peasant War: Horst Buszello, "Deutungsmuster des Bauernkriegs in historischer Perspektive", in Bauernkrieg (see above, n. 50), eds. Horst Buszello et al., pp. 1-22. Cf. also note 50.

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Finally it must he emphasized that the practice of war in the Early Modern Period is by the simultaneity of the three types of wars with different weighting time and place. according to The wars of state formation from the 15th to the 17th centuries generally portray subcultural wars which only took on the character of transcultural conflicts when social, religious or political stereotypes of repression were effective. On the European periphery and in the New World transcultural wars took place throughout the entire period. The opponent was as much stylised as the absolute enemy, as his place in a world order defined by Christians was disputed. In the course of the formation of the ius publicum europaeum from the second half of the 17th century and the establishment of the European system of states, violent conflicts increasingly acquired the character of intracultural clashes, in which ultimately, under the influence of the European Enlightenment even the outlying powers of Russia and the Ottoman Empire were characterised

included.

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image of eighteenth century warfare in Europe is one bounded by common cultural assumptions. Wars were fought between standing armies, recognisable as such by uniforms, drill and discipline. They were the instruments of sovereign states, and those states recognised the legitimacy of their opponents. Antoine-Henri Jomini was the nineteenth-century theorist who by both his career and his teaching came closest to giving these shared values doctrinal coherence. Read or imitated throughout Europe, he established the notion that what Stephen Morillo calls 'intracultural warfare' was the norm. His preference, he confessed in his most widely read work, Le précis de I 'art de la guerre, first published in 1838, was 'in favor of the good old times when the French and English Guards courteously invited each other to fire first, as at Fontenoy'.1 In citing a battle fought in 1745, he put to one side the experience so painfully acquired by his own generation in the wars of the French Revolution and Napoleon. Moreover many aspects of the eighteenth-century norm also survived the two world wars of the twentieth century. At the start of the twenty-first, the dress, traditions and ceremonial of armies still reflect values common not only to those which have eighteenth-century antecedents but also to more recent creations persuaded that such patterns of behaviour are the foundations of a military culture. Senior officers attend each other's staff colleges; international arms sales disseminate comparable weapons systems. Thus both education and technology promote convergence, not divergence, in warfare.2 For many contemporary observers of armed conflict, however, that is just the problem: because modem armies behave as though they are bound by a common culture, they can be both slow to detect cultural differences and cumbersome in their reactions to forces that do not conform to stereotype. False expectations of the enemy generate misunderstanding about the nature of war, and ultimately even lead to defeat. The

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Jomini, Summary of the art of war, trans. George H. Mendell and William P. Craighill (Philadelphia, 1862), pp. 34-5. On the export of European military styles, see David Ralston, Importing the European army (Chicago, 1990). Baron de

2

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increasingly powerful discourse therefore sees national strategies as culturally determined, the product of ethnicity, geography and political development.3 Books such as Basil Liddell Hart's The British way in warfare (1932) and Russell Weigley's The American way in warfare (1973) command assent from political scientists just at the point when they have been successfully challenged by historians. Clearly geographical and constitutional factors do affect how states fight. Britain is a prime example. As an island it has, at least historically, used sea power more than land power. Maritime warfare, however, upset many of the expectations derived from continental conflict. Britain developed along lines that favoured liberalism, individualism and capitalism at An

least in part because it was an island, and in 1914 it declared it had to gone to war to uphold these values, not least through the rule of law. And yet Britain's reliance on its navy prepared it to engage in indiscriminate killing of non-combatants through blockade and economic warfare. British sea power may have been a product of national culture, but the pressures of military culture ensured that the Royal Navy was imitated by other navies, even if they were neither sea-girt nor liberal. 'Navalism' before 1914 gripped Austria-Hungary, Italy, Greece and the Ottoman empire, although none aspired to be oceanic powers. Similarly, after 1871 the Prussian army became the model for nations elsewhere, its spiked helmets being as often aped as its general staff. Imitative behaviour was, and is, not just the product of fashion. War is a competitive and reciprocal activity. The common culture of armed forces therefore has a function, whose robustness frequently prevails over national or political differences. Paradox is central to military culture. It may promote militarism, but it also aims to put a pattern on war and so can rationalise and even moderate war's conduct.4 Europe's hope that war could be contained by culture was at least for the modem historian a consequence of the Thirty Years War. Hugo Grotius's De Jure Belli ac Pads argued that there was a law of war as well as of peace. Although the origins of the book lie before the outbreak of the war in 1618, it was not published until 1625, and it was the war that gave its ideas life.5 Over a hundred years later, in Le Droit des Gens (1758), Emmerich de Vattel accepted that all nations had an equal right to go to war, an argument whose corollaries were twofold. First, war was not a private act, and, second, its control lay in its conduct more than its causation. The works of Grotius and Vattel set down norms for behaviour in war. Prisoners were taken and could expect to be released at the war's end, rather than be killed out of hand or sold into slavery. -

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Cases in point are Stephen Peter Rosen, Societies and military power: India and its armies (Ithaca, 1996) and Elizabeth Kier, Imagining war: French and British military doctrine between the wars 4

(Princeton, 1997). For

an

attempt to define military culture,

see

Don M.

Snider, "America's 'multicultural' military",

Orbis 43 5

(winter 1999), pp. 11-26. Hugo Grotius, 77;e rights of war and peace, trans. 1901), p. 7.

A.C.

Campbell and David C.

Hill

(Washington,

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The notion of the eighteenth century as an era of limited war was, however, a caricature embellished after the Napoleonic wars for his own purposes by Carl von Clausewitz, particularly in book 2, chapter 2, of Vom Kriege. His criticisms not only of Jomini but even more of Heinrich von Bülow portrayed their visions of war as bounded by geometry rather than reality.6 Clausewitz's point-scoring was embraced with a little too much eagerness by his early twentieth-century successors. Historians today are more wary of typecasting eighteenth century warfare in this way. They point out that the soldiers of the armies of the Enlightenment were better at respecting the rights of other soldiers than they were those of civilians. Cursed with rudimentary supply systems, they raped, looted and pillaged.7 The populations of besieged cities, once they had refused the offer of terms, could expect no quarter when their walls had been breached. Of all the armies which fought in the French revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, the British remained most rooted in eighteenth-century practices. Moreover, in the Peninsular war it was fighting on the territory of its allies in the war against France. The first and most eloquent English historian of that war, William Napier, commanded the 43rd Light Infantry at the siege of Badajoz in March 1812. The 43rd had been trained by Sir John Moore according to the precepts of the military enlightenment: it saw itself as a crack regiment, and it stormed the main breach in the town's defences. 'It is now', Napier wrote of his regiment immediately after the fall of the town, 'a desolate deserted dwelling'.8 Napier was grieving not for the casualties sustained in the assault but for the loss of discipline in the subsequent sack. For two days his own soldiers abandoned themselves to what, over twenty years later, he still called 'shameless rapacity, brutal intemperance, savage lust, cruelty and murder'.9 The inhabitants, Spanish 'of all ages and sexes', were victims of their barbarity. 'The French were the only people to whom they gave quarter, out of a spirit of honour, not of humanity.'10 So the common culture was a military one, shaped by a shared code and a similar sense of profession. Those who did not live by the sword were not able to participate in it or to benefit from its protection. Wars fought by European armies outside Europe were thus 'inter-cultural' in two senses. The first was the result of the obvious differences of race, religion and geography. The Treaty of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years War in 1648 may have drawn a line under wars between Protestants and Catholics, but it did not end conflict between Christianity and Islam. In battles between Austrians and Russians on the one hand and Ottoman Turks on the other, there were no obvious restraints, even between professional soldiers. Prisoners of war did not enjoy the slender protections 6 7

8 9

10

Carl von Clausewitz, On War, trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton, 1976), pp. 135-6. John Childs, Armies and warfare in Europe 1648-1789 (Manchester, 1982), pp. 1-27. Priscilla Napier, The sword dance: Lady Sarah Lennox and the Napiers (London, 1971), p. 310. William F. P. Napier, History of the war in the Peninsula, 6 vols. (London, 1828-40), vol. 4, p. 431. Priscilla Napier, The sword dance (see above, n. 8), p. 310.

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afforded them in wars between Christian powers. It was 'impossible to imagine the horror and incongruity of the assorted sights' of the battle of Izmail in December 1790. Most of the Russian 'soldiers were laden with plunder and they were almost unrecognisable under their Turkish coats and clothing. Everywhere you could see halfnaked survivors of the first butchery, who were running about in search of some refuge from the fury of the soldiers.'11 Among those Russian soldiers were Cossacks, who for later generations became the embodiment not of European norms but of Asiatic backwardness. In 1815 the Tsar, Alexander I, a self-avowedly Christian prince, proved his own self-image by drafting the Holy Alliance, his vision of an international order based on the teachings of the Gospel. But when his army entered Paris, the conquered French feared for the survival of the Enlightenment's legacy: the Cossacks, irregular cavalry armed with lances and mounted on steppe ponies, became the successors of Genghis Khan and the Mongol hordes. The same image recurred almost a century later as the outriders of the Russian army crossed the frontier with East Prussia in August 1914. In the First World War Germany cast its eastern front as the bulwark of European civilisation against barbarism. Hitler would exploit such notions to devastating effect in the Second World War.

The Cossacks of the eighteenth century were exempt from serfdom. They stood at one remove from the state. The savagery of war on the Ottoman frontier was therefore explicable not just in terms of religion but also once again by reference to military culture, or rather to the lack of it. The Janissary corps of the Ottoman empire had been one of the most impressive standing armies of the sixteenth century, and its influence could be seen in the imitative behaviour of European units in the seventeenth century: military music; the corollary of marching in step and thus of drill and order, was 'Turkish' music.'2 But by the late eighteenth century Turkish standards of training and discipline lagged behind those maintained in the west. The Ottoman empire struggled to pay for and maintain its troops. Corruption flourished and central control was challenged. Irregular warfare once again blurred the dividing lines between soldier and civilian, and between the idea of soldiering out of duty to the state and soldiering as a form of private enterprise.13 Therefore the second trans-cultural difference was that wars on Europe's periphery were not necessarily wars between standing armies. Many opponents outside Europe -

11

The fortress in the age of Vauban and Frederick the Great, 1660-1789 p. 249; see also Christopher Duffy, Siege warfare: The fortress in the early modern world 1494-1660 (London, 1979), pp. 217-19. Henry Farmer, Military music (London, 1950), p. 35. Virginia Aksan, "Ottoman war and warfare 1453-1812", in War in the early modern world 14501815, ed. Jeremy Black (London, 1999), pp. 168-70; Virginia Aksan, "Whatever happened to the Janissaries? Mobilization for the 1768-1774 Russo-Ottoman war", War in History 5 (1998), pp. 2336.

Christopher Duffy, (London, 1985),

12 13

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soldiers, but warriors. They fought not as professionals separate from their parent societies, but as the representatives of those societies. The acme of civilisation in eighteenth-century France was the salon in which philosophes could discourse, not the were

not

camp in which the officer drilled his men. The latter were the dregs of society, not its role models. They fulfilled a socially useful function by freeing civilians to go about their normal and productive occupations. For the colonised, as opposed to the colonisers, martial skills could be the definition of manhood. Moreover, many tribal communities were shaped and adapted primarily to meet the needs of war. When Europeans fought against them, they engaged not just armies but whole societies. They set out to destroy those societies through war economically, culturally and ethnically. Sir Jeffrey Amherst, fighting in North America in 1763, could adopt a strategy that we would now call genocidal, the deliberate introduction of smallpox to suppress Pontiac's rebellion. British soldiers fighting in North America were sufficiently aware of the distinction between European war and war in the colonies to be able to use crossing the cultural divide as a threat. In 1757 Amherst's predecessor, Lord Loudon, claimed that T chuse to carry on the War with strict Faith between the Nations and the greatest Humanity to the Particulars'. But he felt that his French opponents, by allying with Indians and adopting their methods, were less scrupulous. 'Whatever Troops you bring into the Field are to me French, therefore if any Part of them break through the Rules of War, will immediately lay me under the disagreeable necessity to Treat the whole of your People in the same manner.'14 An obvious question to ask of eighteenth century war is how far habits practised in inter-cultural conflicts outside Europe were then reintroduced to Europe. It is raised with particular force by to the Highlanders of north-west Scotland, whose 'charge' with broadsword and targe achieved stunning successes until broken at the battle of Culloden in 1746.15 Clan chiefs, whose lands and titles were forfeit as a result of the Jacobite rebellion, regained a foothold in their native land by raising regiments for service in the British army overseas. Highlanders often under Scottish commanders like Loudon fought with ferocity as part of the British army in America. Some see this as the result not of the Highlanders' own warlike traditions but of a learnt lesson. The Duke of Cumberland's suppression of the Jacobites after Culloden has become for certain Scottish nationalist historians an example of genocide or ethnic cleansing.16 Certainly the 1745 rebellion shows that the Protestant-Catholic divide had not lost all its force in war. Moreover, the Highland way of life seemed socially and economically -

-

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15

16

Armstrong Starkey, European and native American warfare 1675-1815 (London, 1998), p. 102. James Michael Hill, Celtic warfare 1595-1763 (Edinburgh, 1986), is the most systematic treatment of the topic. Allan I. Macinnes, "The aftermath of the '45", in 1745: Charles Edward Stuart and the Jacobites, ed. Robert C. Woosnam-Savage (Glasgow, 1995), pp. 103-13, and especially p.103, where Macinnes describes the suppression as 'genocide'.

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backward, not least to Lowland Scots. But as Scotland's current love of 'Highlandism' shows, the clans' assimilation, as well as their emasculation, was also a feature of the Jacobites' defeat. The key point about the 1745 rebellion (and possibly even Pontiac's rebellion) was just what its name says: it was an affront to the power of the centralising state. The same observation could be made about the excesses committed by both sides in the American War of Independence. The growth of the early modem state was intimately linked to its determination to monopolise military force, and to its determination to refine and develop that force. The French revolution of 1789 is striking evidence that the excesses of conflicts outside Europe were not transposed back into Europe. The revolution completed the process begun by the absolutist state. It transformed the power of the state with dramatic consequences for its military capability. But revolutionary France did not wage war with the same brutality as it showed in the Terror at home: it guillotined its own generals by the hundred, but it continued to treat the enemy commanders it captured according to the conventions of war. Moreover, despite France's determination to export its revolution through war, the other powers of Europe remained ready to compromise, a characteristic which left them vulnerable to Napoleon. They continued to accord French soldiers the rights of prisoners of war, and they did not execute Bonaparte when they finally caught him in 1814 and again in 1815. If there was a cultural difference that shaped the fighting of the Napoleonic wars, it was still the divide between the soldier and civilian. What appalled contemporaries (Jomini most famous among them) was the resolve of the civilian to fight back. Guerrillas, not only in Spain but also in Italy, Switzerland and Russia, posed a major challenge to the dominance of military culture. For much of the nineteenth century European war could be contained as it had been in the eighteenth. The two cultures military and civilian were kept apart. Guerrillas made armies uncomfortable because they were civilians who were not non-combatants: guerrillas did not make soldiers prisoners, and soldiers killed guerrillas out of hand. Guerrillas stood on the cusp of war and its culture on the one hand, and civil society and its culture on the other. The same might have been said about rebels, but in general in the nineteenth century was not. Armies were careful not to allow war and revolution to converge. This was a basic axiom of the Vienna settlement of 1815. Revolution had given rise to war in 1792; the onset of war had legitimated the revolution and had allowed the consolidation of revolution within France through the terror; France itself had then exported revolution abroad through the agency of war; and, finally, even conservative regimes had had to flirt with revolutionary concepts, like conscription, in order to oust the French invaders. Throughout the rest of the nineteenth centuries European armies worked hard to keep war and revolution in separate boxes. With the major and important exception of the American Civil War, rebellions were treated as revolutions, not as 'sub-cultural' wars. -

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The manner in which regular armies suppressed revolutions showed that soldiers lost of their ferocity when dealing with civilians. But such clashes happened less frequently in war itself. Sieges went out of fashion, and when they occurred as at Sevastopol in 1854-55, and at Paris in 1870-71 they were not incorporated in the triumphalist narrative of the wars at whose heart they lay. Armies sought open fields in which to have their battles; even in 1914 itself, they manoeuvred away from big cities, like Paris, Belgrade or Warsaw, rather than into them. Armies planned to fight each other, and in general did so. Those same armies, therefore, drew a sharp distinction between what they called 'civilised wars' and 'savage wars'. In the latter they fought not armies, organised as they were, but whole societies and their ways of life, just as their eighteenth-century predecessors had done in North America. Their soldiers knew that if they were taken alive, they could be castrated, disembowelled or scalped before they were eventually put to death. The laws of war did not apply. These were inter-cultural wars, and they created real challenges for European armies at several levels, not just in terms of the none

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prevailing customs relating to war. Constructing narratives for nineteenth century colonial conflicts is fraught on two grounds. The first is the traditional difficulty with all military history: it tends to be written by the victors. The second is peculiar to societies with low levels of literacy or an ill-developed tradition of memoir-writing: the materials for reassembling the decision-making process on 'the other side of the hill' are absent. In 1896, CE. Callwell, a British artillery officer, synthesised the experience of colonial warfare in Small wars: their principles and practice. Callwell's book prompts two observations. The first is that until Small wars no European army had made any sustained attempt to analyse 'savage wars': they were seen as exceptional, even if as in the British case they were more often the rule than were wars within Europe. Secondly, by 1896 the process of colonial conquest was almost complete. It was so for reasons that in military terms were specific to the late nineteenth century the advent of steam, the in and the introduction the of improvements tropical medicine, breech-loading rifle and -

-

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the machine gun. Steamboats enabled armies to move up rivers and so penetrate the interiors of lands, and railways then opened up those lands to settlement and trade. Quinine kept malaria at bay and improved sanitation checked typhus and cholera. The pay-off was on the battlefield. Small arms fire became the force multiplier which allowed European forces to break whole populations on the battlefield, despite inferior numbers. Callwell argued that in colonial wars strategic considerations favoured the local population: they knew the terrain, they were inured to the climate, and they had the support of the entire people. 'Strategy is not, however, the final arbiter in war. The battle-field decides, and on the battle-field the advantage passes over to the regular army. Superior armament, the force of discipline, a definite and acknowledged chain of responsibility, esprit de corps, the moral force of civilization, all these work together to

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give the trained and organized army an incontestable advantage from the point of view of tactics.'17 Callwell therefore laid it down as a general rule of colonial war that the regular forces should seek battle. In reality, however, inter-cultural conflict did not prove so simple, not least because the effects of military culture could cut across wider cultural expectations. In the 2nd Maratha War (1803-5), both British commanders, Gerard Lake and Arthur Wellesley (later the Duke of Wellington), expected to fight against an irregular opponent, light horsemen versed in guerrilla war. In fact they got a nasty surprise when the Marathas incorporated western technologies and western skills to wage extraordinarily destructive conventional battles. At the battle of Assaye Wellesley suffered between 30 and 50 percent casualties. According to his subsequent reputation in European war, he won this campaign on the battlefield; in fact he nearly lost it there. He was saved because of the ill-developed nature of Maratha state power. The East India Company prevailed because of its economic superiority: it could supply and pay its troops. Callwell would have called these factors strategic, not tactical.18 Neither Wellesley nor the East India Company fully recognised what had happened at Assaye. The conquest of the Punjab, in which again the British confronted an army trained in western methods and equipped with comparable technologies, similarly exposed the frailty of the assumption that battle was the natural recourse of the European power. Sir Hugh Gough, the commander in all the battles of the two Sikh wars of 1845-6 and 1848-9, preferred shock effect to firepower, battle to manoeuvre. He underestimated the effects of Indian artillery with bloody consequences. The British learnt lessons in the use of heavy artillery from the Sikhs, not from war in Europe.19 Even in conflicts in which battles were decisive, the colonial conqueror could still fail fully to appreciate why he had won. In New Zealand, Maori 'pa' tended to be sited on hills, near the sea and adjacent to cultivated ground. Their wooden palisades made obvious targets for British guns, whether fired from ships or brought across the even terrain of the fields. On 29 April 1864 the British fired twenty times the weight of shell per square yard at Gate 'pa' as they did on the Somme between 24 June and 1 July 1916.20 The Maori proved adaptive in their responses: again culture is insufficient as an explanation. They abandoned the 'pa' rather than fight for them; they used them as decoys; they erected dummy 'pa'; and they ensured that the guts of their defences lay not in their wooden walls but in earthworks and subterranean

17 18

19

20

systems. The Maori

were

Charles E. Callwell, Small wars: Their principles and practice, 3rd ed. (London, 1906), p. 90. Randolf Cooper, The Anglo-Maratha campaigns and the contest for India: The strugglefor control of the South Asian military economy (Cambridge, 2003). Hew Strachan, From Waterloo to Balaclava: Tactics, technology and the British army 1815-1854 (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 123-5. James Belich, The New Zealand wars and the Victorian interpretation of racial conflict (Auckland, 1986), p. 295. Belich has been challenged by Ken Stead, "Fortifications in New Zealand wars", The Volunteers: The journal of the New Zealand Militaiy Historical Society 24 (1998), pp. 57-63.

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fully defeated. The British admired them for the bravery as warriors, but they did

not learn transferable lessons from their skills in field fortification.

Callwell's emphasis on decisive battle as a key characteristic of colonial conquest therefore needs to be modified. Of course regular armies had advantages on the battlefield, but the crux was one which he failed to emphasise their ability to sustain defeat without that defeat being decisive. In the Zulu war of 1879, the British suffered a major initial setback at Isandhwalna, when their central column (of three) was wiped out. Cetshwayo, the Zulu chief, believed that his victory would persuade the British to retreat to the Natal frontier. It did no such thing, and by refusing to negotiate the British not the Zulus showed how they possessed the strategic advantages.21 Warrior societies needed their men to hunt or to cultivate; they could not sustain wars of long duration. Civilised societies could: regular professional armies, divorced from their parent societies, could be maintained in the field, for years if need be. They had less need of early decisive battles than they realised. The British army observed the distinction in combatant status between those who fought and those who nurtured in European war, but not in Zululand. It broke its opponents economically before not after it destroyed them on the battlefield. Both in India and in Zululand, the bulk of the British forces were not British. Regular units of the crown provided the stiffening deemed so necessary in battle itself, but they were supplemented by locally raised levies, under white commanders. Between 1870 and 1914 Britain held its empire with a system of colonial garrisoning which kept one battalion per regiment at home and one abroad. Only twice in 1882 for the conquest of Egypt and 1899-1902 for the war in South Africa did they have to disrupt this rotation.22 In other words they fought all the other colonial conflicts that occurred in this period with the troops that were already in place. A typical punitive expedition would contain one or two regular infantry battalions for quality and local units the Indian army, the King's African Rifles, and the like for numbers. The Indian army fused two different cultural traditions in something that was distinctively its own. On the one hand, its adaptation of the caste system and its handling of the socalled 'martial races' of the sub-continent took Indian culture but recast it and deepened it. On the other, its disciplinary practices were British.23 Local forces fighting local opponents could have recourse to local methods. The colonial levies raised by Portugal and Belgium for service in Africa used atrocity as an -

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Laband, Kingdom 1992).

John

in crisis: The Zulu response to the British invasion

of 1879 (Manchester,

The fighting profession: The professionalization of the British line infantry 1870-1902 officer corps (Glasgow University PhD thesis, 2004). Rosen, Society and military power (see above, n. 3) takes the view that the army of the British East India Company army was separate from Indian society, and this was why it prevailed. Kaushik Roy has looked at the army after the mutiny of 1857 to argue that the two traditions fused to create something that was a hybrid, even if still distinct. See Corinne

Mahaffey,

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instrument of war. They saw campaigning as a way to procure women, slaves and loot. Their disregard for the norms of European military culture appalled not only civilian observers but also much more significantly other soldiers. Random executions, plundering, raping and looting were taken as evidence of a lack of discipline. Highlanders were therefore not the only soldiers who might be accused of being poachers who became gamekeepers, and who in the process brought different cultural approaches to fighting to the wars of empire. Again the argument that sees a potential cross-over between the conduct of war outside Europe and its waging within is tendentious. The French troops under Eugène Cavaignac, who put down the Paris revolution in three bloody days of fighting between 24 and 26 June 1848, suffered over 800 deaths, and killed or wounded between 3,000 and 6,000 revolutionaries.24 Leroy de Saint-Arnaud, who would go on to command the French army in the Crimea in 1854, was disgusted by the crowds, expressing himself in terms which were redolent with the military's disdain for the civilian who took up arms: 'Pas un homme..., pas l'ombre d'un homme! Des criards, des phraseurs, des trembleurs!'25 Cavaignac, Saint-Arnaud and most of their men had served in North Africa. They had leamt their trade under Thomas-Robert Bugeaud, commander-in-chief of the army of Africa between 1841 and 1847. Bugeaud used terror to conquer Algeria. His troops massacred, pillaged, raped and ravaged. One chef de bataillon told his men: 'Kill all the men over the age of fifteen, and put all the women and children aboard ships bound for the Marquesas Islands, or elsewhere. In a word, annihilate everyone who does not crawl at our feet like dogs.'26 According to some recent calculations, the population of Algeria fell by a third in the wake of the French invasion.27 Bugeaud maintained that his troops were conforming to the norms of war of Africa, not of Europe. And yet he also gave the lie to his own defence. The lessons of counterinsurgency war were not new to the army of France: they had leamt them in Europe, suppressing the counter-revolution in the Vendée in the 1790s and the guerrillas in Spain in the Peninsular war (a campaign in which Bugeaud himself had served).28 Revolutions could be crushed with just as much determination by regular armies without colonial experience as by those with. The characteristic common to both was that they felt no ties of kinship with those whom they were called on to suppress. The experience of the Prussian army shows that this determination had little connection with notions of inter-cultural conflict and much more to do with a common military culture. The Prussian army had never served outside Europe before it defeated -

-

William Serman and Jean-Paul Bertaud, Nouvelle histoire militaire de la France 1789-1919 (Paris, 1998), p. 280. Raoul Girardet, La société militaire de 1815 à nos jours (Paris, 1998), p. 101. Antony Thrall Sullivan, Thomas-Robert Bugeaud. France and Algeria, 1784-1849: Politics, power and the good society (Hamden, 1983), p. 125. Le Monde, 26 octobre 2004. Serman and Bertaud, Nouvelle histoire militaire de la France (see above, n. 24), p. 262.

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France in 1870-1. The story of its triumph was, moreover, told in selective fashion, to accord with Napoleonic ideals of decisive victory gained in short order. It culminated in a matter of weeks on the battlefield of Sedan. The bitter fighting that followed, including the siege of Paris and the Commune, when civilians suffered as much as soldiers, was treated as a footnote, a story more important in the internal history of France as it moved from the Second Empire to the Third Republic. Léon Gambetta's levée en masse was written out of the narrative.29 The German army denied the francs tireurs of the Third Republic basic combatant rights, and could too easily treat all civilians as potential enemies. The issues were still the definition of combatant status and the protection that that afforded.30 The two world wars of the twentieth century broke down all three distinctions, that between war and revolution, that between soldier and civilian, and that between Europe and the rest of the world. John Home and Alan Kramer have recently suggested that the story of the 'mains coupées' that Belgian children had their hands cut off by German soldiers in 1914 may have had its origin in atrocities carried out by Belgian soldiers in the Congo.31 The evidence of the First World War, however, is not that armies with colonial experience behaved with less restraint than those without. Indeed, it could be construed to show the exact opposite. The German suppression of the Hereros in South West Africa has been held up as a precursor of genocide, and to this could be added the crushing of the Maji-Maji revolt in East Africa in 1907.32 But the connections with war in Europe are tenuous. By 1914 Germany was already a more enlightened colonial power. Moreover, those who marched through Belgium in that year had not fought in Africa a decade previously. The precursors of their atrocities are more easily traced to the actions of their fathers in France forty years before than they are to Africa. If colonial warfare had been a key determinant of excess in 'civilised warfare', the soldiers who should have been readier to commit atrocities in the First World War would have been those of Britain, France and the United States. The British army in 1914 had the most direct experience of 'savage' war. It had shown itself in the Indian Mutiny of 1857 and the Zulu war of 1879, to name only the best known to fight as the local circumstances demanded, breaching any notions of non-combatant immunity, and -

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Stig Förster, "Facing 'people's war': Moltke the elder and Germany's military options after 1871", Journal of Strategic Studies 11 (1988), pp. 209-30. Mark Stoneman, "The Bavarian army and French civilians in the war of 1870-1871: A cultural interpretation", War in History 8 (2001), pp. 271-93. John Home and Alan Kramer, German atrocities 1914: A history of denial (New Haven, 2001), pp.

223, 376,423. Trutz von Trotha, '"The fellows can just starve': On wars of 'pacification' in the African colonies of Imperial Germany and the concept of 'total war'", in Anticipating total war: The German and American experiences 1871-1914, eds. Manfred Boemeke, Roger Chickering and Stig Förster (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 415-33.

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most norms and laws of war.

And yet the British army continued to make the same distinction that had concerned Lord Loudon, that between wars against savages and civilised war. Moreover, even in a colonial context, war had its own inbuilt constraint. Its ultimate purpose was settlement, and its most effective tool assimilation, not continued confrontation. Hubert Lyautey, the conqueror of Morocco, was the best exemplar of this tension. Like other imperial soldiers, he was no respecter of limitations or of civilian status, but he was aware of the tension between practice and theory. The soldier was the colony's conqueror first but then its administrator and benefactor. In the Revue des deux mondes in 1900 Lyautey penned the clearest exposition of the soldier's social role in the colonies.34 The collapse of the Europe/colonial distinction in warfare in the first half of the twentieth century was in the first instance due to its global nature. In 1914 Europeans fought against each other outside Europe, something which they had in general forborne to do since the eighteenth century. They also used their colonial troops in Europe, the French bringing Africans across the Mediterranean and the British deploying Indians on the western front in 1914-15. German propaganda was not slow to portray this as uncivilised. The Senegalese, it was said, did not take prisoners. In May 1917 a member of Britain's Imperial War Cabinet, Jan Christian Smuts, who had commanded the British forces in East Africa in 1916, proposed a convention among the imperial powers of central Africa to prevent the military training of the native population. Ostensibly he was worried by the possibility of a German army of black troops. In reality his Afrikaner origins made him fearful that European recruitment would undermine white supremacy within Africa itself. In 1919, after the war was over, the militarisation of sub-Saharan Africa was debated at the Versailles peace conference. Lloyd George accused the Germans of raising and encouraging native 'troops to behave in a manner that would have disgraced the Bolsheviks'. He conceded that 'the French and British, doubtless, had also raised native troops, but they had controlled them

better'.35

The British claimed that their African troops were raised for police purposes only, and Lord Robert Cecil's draft for the establishment of mandates restricted native troops to local defence. The French were not happy with such ideas: for them the manpower of their colonies could make good their falling domestic birth-rate. Both before and after the First World War they saw colonial troops as vital to the defence of the metropolis, and in doing so they were happy to acknowledge and even exploit the Africans' Michael Lieven, '"Butchering the brutes all 1879", History 84 (1999), pp. 614-32.

over

the

place': Total war and massacre in Zululand,

Douglas Porch, "Bugeaud, Galliéni, Lyautey: the development of French colonial warfare", in Makers of modern strategy from Machiavelli to the nuclear age, ed. Peter Paret (Oxford, 1986), pp. 388-95. Shelby Cullom Davis, Reservoirs of men: A histoiy of the black troops of French west Africa (Geneva, 1934), pp. 159-61.

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The experience and the aftermath of the First World War embedded the notion that the use of non-European troops in conflicts between 'civilised' nations imported a savagery that was alien to the norms of European military culture. Blacks formed part of France's army of occupation in the Ruhr, and in Mein Kampf (1924) Hitler was quick to cite this as evidence of the contamination of Europe.37 He was not alone. In the Second World War, Erwin Rommel saw the North African campaigns as 'a war without hate', a conflict in which civilians did not get in the way and in which military honour could predominate. In September 1942 he personally interrogated Brigadier G.R.Clifton, the Pakeha commander of a New Zealand brigade. This was a meeting between professional soldiers with shared values, to the point that Rommel admired Clifton's subsequent attempt to escape. However, when Rommel complained that the New Zealand division in North Africa had massacred both prisoners and wounded, Clifton was quick to suggest that the fault lay not with his white troops but with the Maori.38 Moreover, in the inter-war period the European powers saw their colonial conflicts not as separate from and more backward than European war, but as a laboratory in which to develop and refine new techniques for application in future wars in Europe. The British in Iraq in the 1920s bombed communities from the air, and the Spanish in the Rif and the Italians in Abyssinia used gas as well. The line, however, that runs from inter-cultural war outside Europe to intra-cultural conflict within it, and attributes to that connection the atrocities of the Second World War, was no more direct in 1939 than in 1914. Aerial bombardment was first used, in 1912, by a European power, Italy, in Libya, a colonial context. In the 1920s Giulio Douhet, the pre-eminent advocate of strategic bombing, was indeed Italian. But it was the First World War that in 1917-18 provided the context for the creation of independent bombing fleets, designed to attack industry and ready to accept the corollary of civilian casualties. The very intensity of European war itself justified the breaching of non-combatant immunity within the 'civilised' world. Moreover, the argument that contended that bombing would win wars in short order relied more on evidence of its effects on soldiers in the trenches in 1918 than on what it did to civilians. The barbarisation of intra-cultural European warfare in the twentieth century does not, regrettably, need an inter-cultural explanation. The point is made even more explicitly by the case of gas. Gas was first used in 1915 to break the trench stalemate on the eastern and western fronts, and it was designed to kill soldiers not civilians. Its employment, although quickly cited as evidence of atrocity, was set within the context of a European military culture, and moved outwards from Europe to the periphery not vice versa.

reputation for blood-thirstiness.

-

Charles Mangin, La force noire (Paris, 1910) put the case for such an army. Marc Michel, Les Africains et la Grande Guerre: L'appel à l'Afrique (1914-1918) a revised edition of a book published in 1982), pp. 237-8. Basil Henry Liddell Hart ed., The Rommel papers (London, 1953), pp. 281-2.

(Paris, 2003;

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What is therefore striking about the Second World War in Europe is not how quickly it flouted the laws of war but how resilient was the notion of a shared military culture despite all the evidence that it was being breached. The German army behaved comparatively well in the west in 1939-41. There were atrocities; civilians were killed from the air, and prisoners of war were shot out of hand. But the fact that it performed so brilliantly on the battlefield consolidated the notion that it also was the repository of the ethical norms of the military profession, not their potential transgressor. After D Day in 1944 American soldiers felt more contempt for French civilians than they did for German soldiers, and not even the evidence of the concentration camps in 1945 could completely shatter the notion that the German army was fundamentally decent.39 The atrocities were portrayed as the work of Nazis, not of Germans, of politically motivated thugs, not of apolitical and professional soldiers. Rommel may have been a second-rank general but he became the embodiment of these values in the west after 1945. Extraordinarily, however, it went further, as even more senior and more suspect figures like Erich von Manstein and Heinz Guderian used the popularity of their memoirs to distance themselves from Hitler and to gain acceptability for themselves and the army that they served. That this image should have been so persistent was also due to the ignorance and neglect of the eastern front in western Europe and America. Until the 1980s the story of the war in Russia was told largely through the voices of Germans.40 Once again Germany portrayed itself as the bulwark of Europe against the hordes of Asia. This narrative may not have been acceptable to America and Britain before 1945, but it became increasingly so thereafter. In the Cold War, an ideological clash between fascism and Bolshevism could lose some of its charge for liberals when 'good' Germans had been fighting to prevent socialism from engulfing Europe. For all that it had tied down and defeated the bulk of the German army in 1941-45, the Red Army was not fully assimilated within the pale of European military culture. At times it tried to be. When the German 6th Army surrendered at Stalingrad, its members became prisoners of war: they were not, despite everything, shot out of hand. But few ever returned home. These glimmers of the past should not obscure the changes in war's norms wrought by conscription, mass mobilisation, and propaganda. The common culture of armies was swamped by the individual culture of the nation in arms. The armies of the two world wars were increasingly politicised armies, motivated and driven by ideology and notions of inter-cultural difference, and so untrammelled by codes of honour which to both Nazis and Bolsheviks represented antiquated values derived from a conservative order. They were committed to the creation of a new world, not the preservation of an old. They confirmed the expectations voiced in Jean Samuel A. Stouffer and others, The American soldier, 4 vols. (Princeton, 1949; reprint 1965), vol. 2, pp. 564-573, 576-8. John Erickson's two volumes, The road to Stalingrad (London, 1975) and The road to Berlin (London, 1983), were the first to change these perspectives.

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Renoir's cinematic masterpiece of the First World War, La Grande Illusion, released in 1937, just two years before the outbreak of the Second. The German camp commandant, von Rauffenstein, recognises that he is linked by class and career to the French prisoner of war, de Boeldieu, but that both will lose in a war which is destroying the aristocratic order on which the shared identity of military culture rests. The conduct of the war in the Pacific provides even more striking evidence of similar points. Racism is not a full explanation for its bestiality. The Japanese army perpetrated atrocities as vile on the civilian populations of China and other conquered territories as they did on the soldiers of the British Commonwealth and the United States. But the latter, although representatives of liberal and democratic states, used race to demonise the enemy. Arguments derived from the causes of the war, ius ad bellum, became the justification for breaching ius in bello, so showing, incidentally, how artificial the distinction was and can be. Their contempt for Japan did not arise from the professional soldiers' contempt for the civilian. Indeed it arose from the exact opposite a In of the tactical the First World British War competence. recognition Japanese army's and Australian soldiers had been pitched against an army of Anatolian peasants of different faith and near eastern origin. But they had been quick to respect the Turkish soldier as an honourable opponent and a doughty defensive fighter. Moreover that reputation survived the knowledge of the appalling death rates in Ottoman prisoner of war camps and of the Armenian massacres of 1915. But in the Second World War the Japanese also of a different ethnicity and a different religion from the British and Australians were not given comparable credit. Japan had elevated military culture to a point where it breached its inherent moderation. Instead of honouring the devotion to duty of the Japanese soldier, his readiness to fight to the last, the British or American serviceman saw such pre-eminently military attributes as evidence of fanaticism and irrationality. They justified his own resolve to kill, and then to disfigure rather than to honour the dead.41 These actions by American soldiers, like the atrocities committed by the Wehrmacht, were glossed over in the Cold War. The taproots of universal military culture became American, more than European. What was true of America was assumed to be true of the rest of the world. Armies and their ways of thinking were once again deemed to be remarkably similar despite cultural differences. Works like Samuel Huntington's The Soldier and the State: the theory and politics of civil-military relations (1957) used comparative military history to argue that armies were apolitical if they were truly professional. Even more pervasive was the impact of deterrence theory, which assumed that nuclear states would behave in similar ways in the event of crisis. Rational actors would therefore act according to criteria that were common, not culturally distinct. This resurgence of military culture was played out in works like Michael Handel's Masters of Strategy (1992), which took precepts from differing authors within the same culture, -

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John Dower, War without mercy: Race and power in the Pacific

war

(London, 1986).

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Clausewitz and Jomini, and an author from a very different culture and time, Sun Tzu, to show that great minds think alike. Strategy in these hands was not a cultural artefact but a form of objective truth. When Ken Booth argued in 1979 that strategy was 'a contextual phenomenon', he was almost alone.42 In the event wars after 1945 were more often fought outside Europe than within it. The Cold War obscured the implications of this for cultural explanations relating to war. In that confrontation, each side assessed itself in the light of the capabilities of the other: this made for what post-Cold War military analysts would call 'symmetry', a phenomenon not unusual among armed forces locked in the arms races of peacetime rivalry. Both the French and German navies before 1914 adopted the 'symmetrical' solution to Britain by themselves building battleships, rather than the 'asymmetrical' one of guerre de course. In the third quarter of the twentieth century the armies of Europe and America coped with wars that were neither nuclear nor 'total' by classifying them in terms that were politically unspecific. Wars were defined in terms of weaponry, as nuclear or conventional; in terms of mobilisation, as total or limited; or in terms of method, as counter-insurgency or low-intensity operations. Such typologies assumed a transference that made little or no allowance for cultural difference. These classifications were put under strain even during the Cold War. In particular Vietnam forced the US Army to re-examine its own way of seeing war. The western military's discovery of Sun Tzu's Art of War dates from the aftermath of the Vietnam war, and was most in evidence in the US Marine Corps manual, Warfighting, first published in 1987. But paradoxically the US Army also re-engaged with the European tradition. In 1976 Michael Howard and Peter Paret edited a fresh translation of Clausewitz's On war. One of the most immediately influential analyses of America's failure, Harry Summers's On strategy (1982), said that Howard and Paret had turned 'this classic into an understandable and usable guide to modem strategy'.43 Summers made no reference to Sun Tzu and presented the defeat in Clausewitzian terms. In the last quarter of the century On War found its way into every American military academy, a publishing phenomenon which itself raised important questions about military culture. This, after all, was a book which had also inspired the most ideologically determined of the US's opponents, first Hitler and the Nazis, and then the Soviet Union. Ostensibly Clausewitz was a touchstone for the notion of a common strategic culture. However, that statement addresses neither the cultural influences which the text underwent in the process of translation, nor which bits of it were read by whom. Between 1945 and 1990 strategic culture was shaped by the threat of a conflict which did not take place. The laws of war could not be so detached: they had to reflect reality rather than expectation. The Geneva convention of 1949 rested on the Booth, Strategy and ethnocentrism (London, 1979), p. 20. Harry Summers, jr, On strategy: A critical analysis of the Vietnam war (Novato, 1982), p. 216. Ken

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presumption of war between armies raised by recognised nation states: its norms were those of common cultural assumptions, even if the most likely war for which the powers seemed to be legislating was one between competing ideologies. But the 1977 protocols recognised that the wars which were being fought, as opposed to thought about, were between states on the one hand and aspirant nations on the other. They gave rights to insurgents and non-state actors. In other words, they aimed to legislate for inter-cultural situations. But in doing so they hoped that insurgents from other cultures would subscribe to the cultural norms of the west. On the whole they did not.44 Over the last quarter of the twentieth century the armed forces of the United States and Europe progressively hedged themselves about with expectations derived from the European cultural tradition of war when fighting outside Europe. European armies engaged in counter-insurgent operations in the 1950s could be as cavalier in regard to non-combatant immunity and combatant rights as their predecessors fighting nineteenth century colonial wars. In Malaya the British transposed whole communities and in Kenya they indiscriminately bombed forests believed to harbour Mau Mau insurgents. The French in Algeria used torture and not just of men, but also of women and children.45 In the 1960s, and especially after May 1968, both armies found that practices which were condoned or unreported in the colonies were not admissible within their own homelands. The British army's difficulty in coming to terms with insurgency in Northern Ireland was the result in part of a cultural shift: the methods of colonial counter-insurgency were not appropriate in Belfast or Londonderry. The American army was called to account for its practices in Vietnam in 1971, when the details of the My Lai massacre of 1968 became public. By 2000 all three armies knew that they had to use force with discrimination and according to specific rules of engagement. But their opponents did not make the same assumptions. The norms and laws of war have become weapons for armies seeking the moral and legal high ground, but they have made war's conduct more difficult for those on the ground itself. Their enemies have continued to see war according to their own cultural assumptions. Technology has given insurgents weapons that are cheap and effective AK47 rifles and surface-to-air missiles. Through terrorism they have the means to wage war at even greater distances, with the result that they themselves not the United States or the former colonial powers are able to breach such principles as non-combatant immunity. The west defined the terms of counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism, but largely did so when the nuclear umbrella and the Cold War meant that they seemed lesser forms of war, if they were wars at all. The end of the Cold War gave such conflicts greater salience, and exposed the fact that the west's cultural assumptions made its military responses reactive. Its record in such conflicts proved too often to be one of defeat, defeats which could largely be -

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See part III of Geoffrey Best, War and law since 1945 (Oxford, 1994). Raphaëlle Branche, La torture et l'armée pendant la guerre d'Algérie (Paris,

2001).

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accounted for in cultural terms. As a result cultural approaches to the study of war grew in influence. John Keegan's A history of warfare, published in 1993, was the most a prime determinant of the nature of warfare', and cogent statement that 'culture is that accordingly culture could limit or control war.46 Using a selective reading of Sun Tzu, he saw oriental war as conforming to different set of cultural expectations. However, he also argued that 'soldiers are not as other men', conflating them with warriors into a single culture.47 Keegan was much impressed by the work of Victor Davis Hanson, to whose book, The western way of war: infantry battle in classical Greece, published in 1989, he had contributed an introduction. Hanson argued that the pursuit of decisive battle was an invention of the ancient Greeks, who sought a quick end to war, however sanguinary, for reasons that were economic and cultural. As smallfarmers, they needed to return to their plots as soon as possible; as citizens, they were fighting for a political entity of which they were part. In 2001 Hanson extended his thesis in an even more ambitious book, Why the west has won: carnage and culture from Salamis to Vietnam. He identified military culture with western culture, and he studied battles in which he found 'the same paradigms of freedom, decisive shock action, civic militarism, technology, capitalism, individualism, and civilian audit and open dissent'. This was a book which lumped rather than split, tracing a straight line over two millennia from ancient Greece to the United States: 'in the flesh it is a long way from Greek fire to napalm, from ostracism to impeachment, but in the abstract, not so distant after all. '48 It was an extraordinary over-simplification of world history in general and the history of warfare more particularly. It left the European 'dark ages' out of account in its pursuit of continuity, and it did not allow for the possibility that the last flowering of classical culture had been not Rome but Byzantium in which case its legacy was to be found in early Islamic society and, ironically for Hanson's American triumphalism, in tenth-century Baghdad. Nor could Hanson explain why the 'west' did not win outside Europe in the early modem period, but had instead to accept the limitations of sea power, the resilience of other military cultures, and the need for assimilation with local forces and practices.49 Hanson's selectivity applies therefore to the imitative aspects of military culture. Western armies, he argued, shunned manoeuvre, evasion, and deception indeed all that Basil Liddell Hart in an equally one-sided account of the history of war called the 'indirect approach'. When non-westem armies had defeated western they had, Hanson believed, done so because they had adopted western methods but they had not been ultimately victorious because they had never done so with anything like the ...

-

-

-

Keegan, A history ofwarfare (London, 1993), p. 387. Keegan, A history ofwarfare (see above, n. 46), p. xvi. Victor Davis Hanson, Why the west has won: Carnage and culture from Salamis to Vietnam (London, 2001), p. 443. Similar points could be made about Geoffrey Parker, The Military Revolution: Military innovation and the rise of the west, 1500-1800 (Cambridge, 1988). John

A General

Typology of Transcultural Wars

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The Modem Ages

103

effectiveness of true western armies, which were underpinned by the nostrums and inventiveness of democracy. He did not see military culture as possessed of its own imitative dynamic, where one civilisation might adopt and adapt, however selectively, the military practices of another.50 Hanson jumped over the problems by most modern European history by moving from the naval battle of Lepanto in 1571 to the British defence of Rorke's drift in the Zulu war of 1879. Rorke's drift was not a decisive battle, in that it did not end the war. Hanson ignored the fact that the Zulus were the smallfarmers, and he exaggerated the democratic credentials of long-service British soldiers, most of whom did not have the vote. The significance of Hanson's book lies in its contemporary influence, not in its historical veracity. Written before the attacks of 11 September 2001, it saw the greatest threat to the west as the consequence of democracy's own military success. According to Hanson, the spread of western values had resulted in the spread of the western way of war, a weapon which might now be turned against the United States. Hanson was blinded by his own selective focus on battles to the exclusion of other elements in war. In 2001 the United States was still pre-eminent in battle. That is why the attacks of 11 September did not use the methods of democratic states. Nonetheless, President Bush immediately set about incorporating international terrorism within paradigms that conformed to the expectations of military and strategic culture. Bush declared a 'war' on terror, and he identified Afghanistan, a state, albeit a 'failed' one, as its home. Most strategic analysts of the early 21st century are less concerned with battle than with what they call 'asymmetrical warfare'. This phrase has come to encompass almost any conflict where the opponent refuses to engage in a clash of armies. At one level the prevalence of ideas about 'asymmetrical warfare' represents the triumph of culturally divergent approaches to military doctrine. However, at another it represents nothing more than a shift in perceptions caused by the end of the Cold War. That conflict was symmetrical, but it remained latent. Since 1990, real conflicts have assumed greater salience in thinking on war, and that is what has made war asymmetrical. The enemy in war abandons theory for pragmatism; he aims to get under his opponent's guard, using the methods of war that will be most effective. In 1917 the German navy abandoned the symmetrical response of fleet action, which condemned it to stalemate at best, and adopted the asymmetrical action of unrestricted submarine warfare, which produced the greatest crisis in British strategy of the First World War. Of course there were cultural obstacles to the maximisation of cruiser war, including the dominant ethos of the German High Seas Fleet, and the challenge to naval hierarchies posed by the delegation of command to junior officers. But war generates its own dynamic. Its imperatives can not because of it. even prompt a readiness to adapt and change despite culture -

This is the nub of John

(Boulder, 2003).

Lynn's sustained riposte to Hanson, Battle: A history of combat and culture

III. Rules of War and War without Rules

Matthew Strickland

Rules of War or War without Rules? Some Reflections on Conduct and the Treatment of Non-Combatants in Medieval Transcultural Wars

-

engagement fought between King Baldwin II of Jerusalem and the Muslim commander Bursuqi near Ezaz in 1125, the renowned historian of the Latin East, William of Tyre, reflected on the nature of warfare between Christians and

Describing,

an

Muslims: Sword clashed against sword with equal ardour, causing terrible carnage and death in many a form. For in conflicts of this nature, resentment and sacrilege and scom of laws always acts as an incentive to bitter hate and enmity. War is waged differently and less vigorously between men who hold the same law and faith than it is between those of diverse opinions and conflicting traditions. For even if no other cause for hatred exists, the fact that the combatants do not share the same articles of faith is sufficient reason for constant quarrelling and enmity.1

Few observations could be more pertinent to a discussion of the nature of conduct in trans-cultural warfare. But was Archbishop William right? Was warfare between those of opposing faiths necessarily more vicious than that fought between co-religionists? The judgement of so perceptive an observer, who is among our principal witnesses for the conduct in warfare in the crusader states up to 1184, should not be dismissed A strong case, moreover, could be made for suggesting that warfare between

lightly.2

William's Frankish 1

2

contemporaries within their homelands, such

as

between the

Willelmi Tyrensis Archiepiscopi Chronicon, ed. Robert B. C. Huygens, 2 vols., Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Medievalis, 63-63A (Turnout, 1986), 13: 16, 49-57; trans. Emily A. Babcock and August C. Krey, A History of Deeds Done beyond the Sea by William Archbishop of Tyre, 2 vols. (New York, 1941, repr. New York, 1976), ii, pp. 24-5. Earlier, he similarly had noted that the battle of Manzikert in 1071 "was actuated by the fiercer hatred which zealous faith and resentment against sacrilege inspires" (Chronicon, i, 9, 26-7; Deeds Done Beyond the Sea, I, p. 78). On William see Peter W. Edbury and John G. Rowe, William of Tyre, Historian of the Latin East (Cambridge, 1988), and especially pp. 151-66, "The War against the Infidel"; and Rainer C. Schwinges, "William of Tyre, the Muslim Enemy, and the Problem of Tolerance", in Tolerance and Intolerance. Social Conflict in the Age of the Crusaders, eds. Michael Gervers and James M. Powell (Syracuse, N.Y., 2001), pp. 124-132.

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Angevins and Capetian monarchs, was indeed waged with considerably greater restraint than against Muslim opponents in Outremer, at least until the later 1190s when the struggle between Richard I and Philip Augustus lent hostilities a new found bitterness. Nevertheless, seen in a wider perspective, not least including the conduct of war fought on the peripheries of Europe even in William's lifetime, there is much to indicate that his dictum requires substantial qualification. To be invited to speak on the topic of conduct in transcultural wars during the Middle Ages, and to be requested to focus in particular on the treatment of noncombatants, is a daunting assignment. The subject raises fundamental questions concerning the extent to which medieval societies did or did not recognize the concept of what would now be termed the non-combatant and afforded immunity from violence to categories of society other than warriors. What ethical, juridical or indeed pragmatic considerations helped shape concepts of more limited aggression and of regulation of conduct in war? How far did the ideals and reality of constraint on the waging of war differ between cultures and over time? If such notions did exist, to what extent were they implemented in war itself or even recognized by warrior elites and their armies? And most crucially in the context of our current investigation, to what extent did concepts of restraint in war operating between protagonists within a culture extent to conduct in war against peoples beyond it? The scope of such an enquiry is potentially enormous.3 Christian-Muslim relations in the Levant and in Spain have naturally attracted a good deal of scholarship, but our understanding of restrain and its limitations would also greatly benefit from an extended comparison of conduct towards enemies in medieval Japanese, Chinese, Mongol and other oriental warfare. Within Europe itself, much of what has been written concerning the treatment of non-combatants in medieval warfare has focused on the Hundred Years War, an intercultural conflict for which the sources are comparatively abundant both for the material effects of war on non-combatants and for contemporary ethical and juridical pronouncements on appropriate conduct in war.4 Accordingly, I have chosen to

3

4

For valuable overviews in relation to western warfare see Michael Howard, "Constraints on Warfare" and Robert C. Stacey, "The Age of Chivalry", both in The Laws of War. Constraints on Warfare in the Western World, eds. Michael Howard, George J. Andreopoulos and Mark R. Shulman (New Haven, 1995), pp. 1-11, 27-39 ; Christopher T. Allmand, "War and the NonCombatant in the Middle Ages", in Medieval Warfare. A History, ed. Maurice Keen (Oxford, 1999), pp. 253-272. See, inter alia, Christopher T. Allmand, "The War and the Non Combatant", in The Hundred Years War, ed. Kenneth Fowler (London, 1971), pp. 163-183 (hereafter cited as Allmand, "The War and the Non Combatant"); Nicholas R. Wright, Knights and Peasants. The Hundred Years War in the French Countiyside (Woodbridge, 1998); and Clifford J. Rogers, "By Fire and Sword. Bellum Hostile and 'Civilians' in the Hundred Years' War", in Civilians in the Path of War, eds. Mark Grimsley and Clifford J. Rogers (Lincoln, 2002), pp. 33-78. For the treatment of prisoners of war in the later Middle Ages see Hannelore Zug Tucci, "Kriegsgefangenschaft im Mittlelalter.

Rules of War or War without Rules?

109

period before c. 1200, and to approach these issues through a overview of three contrasting models of conduct in war; first, the nature of comparative war in much of early medieval Europe, characterized in inter- and transcultural warfare alike by an absence of restraint towards combatants and non-combatants; second, the conduct in war resulting from a clash between societies still practising such unrestricted forms of war and those with more developed notions of conduct, vividly exemplified in the conflicts between the Celtic peoples of Britain and Ireland and their expansionist Anglo-Norman neighbours; and third, the nature of conduct between Frankish and Muslim societies in the Latin East in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries, which were profoundly divided by religious belief yet which also waged war to a very considerable extent according to mutually recognized customs of war. Such an approach can only be impressionistic, but it may serve to test William of Tyre's observations and, by highlighting some of the principal facets of conduct in transcultural warfare, contribute to the wider themes of this conference. Before turning to our case studies, however, it is important to ask to what extent notions of immunity for certain sections of society were articulated in moral or legal theory, and to what extent such immunity was held to apply in transcultural warfare. concentrate here on the

Defining the Non-combatant commonly occurring

medieval term inermis an unarmed person captures the most basic element in the position of those who were not warriors.5 By the later fourteenth century, the categories of those who were entitled to immunity from violence could be clearly articulated, not simply by civil lawyers such as Honoré Bouvet in his Tree of Battles, c. 1386, but perhaps still more significantly, in regulations issued by commanders for the conduct of their armies in the field. Hence the first surviving ordinances for an English army, those promulgated by Richard II for his Scottish campaign of 1385, explicitly protected churchmen, religious, women and any who were not carrying arms.6 When in 1419 Henry V reissued an expanded version of these ordinances, clauses granting more explicit protection to clergy, women, children, The

-

5 6

-

Probleme und erste Forschungsergebnisse", in Krieg im Mittelater, ed. Hans-Henning Kortüm (Berlin, 2001), pp. 123-140. Allmand, "War and the Non-combatant", p. 254. The Black Book of the Admiralty, ed. Travers Twiss, 4 vols., Rolls Series (London, 1871), I, pp. 453-58, at p. 453. Clause 3 reads, "Item, qu nully soit si hardys de robber ne piler église, ne destruir homme de seinte église religious, ne ancre, ne nulle femme, ne de prendre prisoner, sil ne port armes, ne denforcer nulle femme sur peine destre penduz". For these ordinances see Maurice Keen, "Richard IT s Ordinances of War of 1385", in Rulers and Ruled in Late Medieval England. Essays Presented to Gerald Harriss, eds. Rowena E. Archer and Simon Walker (London, 1995), pp. 33-48.

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labourers, ploughmen and merchants were added, doubtless reflecting Henry's concern to protect and win the confidence of his new French subjects.7 Nevertheless, even in inter-cultural wars, a distinction might be drawn between the passive victims of war usefully defined as the 'helpless' by Clifford Rogers and Mark Grimsley and 'active civilians'.8 As Christopher Allmand has pointed out in relation to the Hundred Years War, non-combatants could and indeed often were viewed not merely as the passive and vulnerable targets of the chevauchée or the brigandage of the soldiery, but also as active supporters of warfare through the supply of foodstuffs, revenues through taxation, and through moral and, particularly in the case of clergy, spiritual support.9

-

-

-

-

Bouvet noted in his Tree of Battles that 'a man may very well be taken prisoner in his lord's war, if he helps in that war by either his person or his goods'.10 But while recognizing such contributions, he and other jurists of the later Middle Ages attempted to distinguish between a licit attack on the material elements which supported an enemy's war effort, and the slaying of farmers, townsmen and other non-military elements of society themselves. The latter form of violence breached concepts of proportionality and of 'right intent' inherent in the just war theories of Augustine and Aquinas. As Bouvet noted,

firmly, according to ancient law, and according to the ancient custom of good warriors, that it is an unworthy thing to imprison either old men taking no part in the war, I hold

women, or innocent children. Certainly it is a very bad custom to put them to ransom as it is common knowledge that they can have no part in war, for the former lack strength, the others knowledge. And in truth to capture them would show no great courage, for all gentlemen should keep them from harm and all knights and men-at-arms are bound to do so, and whoever does the contrary deserves the name of pillager." or

Nevertheless, although he expounded on the immunity which ought to be extended to ploughmen, children, the insane, the old and similar categories of society, Bouvet could equally declare that 'if, on both sides, war is decided upon and begun by the councils of

the two kings, the soldiery may take the spoils from the kingdom at will and make war freely: and if sometimes the humble and innocent suffer harm and lose their goods, it cannot be otherwise...' 12 Other than the peace which a strong ruler should enforce, the only effective restraint came from the warrior's own sense of honour: 'Valiant men and wise, however, who follow arms should take pains, so far as they can, not to bear hard 7 8 9 10

11 12

The Black Book of the Admiralty, I, pp. 467-69 (cc. 2, 3, 828, 29, 33, and cf. ce. 26, 37). Civilians In the Path of War, p. ix. Allmand, "The War and the Non Combatant", pp. 163-183. The Tree of Battles of Honoré Bonet, trans. George W. Coopland (Cambridge, Mass., 1949), p. 185 (hereafter cited as The Tree of Battles). The Tree of Battles, p. 185. The Tree of Battles, p. 154. Significantly, Bouvet's comments here were part of his attempts to validate warfare waged by the king of France. For this and the context of his work see Nicholas A. R. Wright, "The Tree of Battles of Honoré Bouvet and the Laws of War", in War, Literature and Politics in the Late Middle Ages, ed. Christopher T. Allmand (Liverpool, 1976), pp. 12-31.

Ill

Rules of War or War without Rules? on

simple

peace'.13

and innocent folk, but

only on those who

make and continue war, and flee

Bouvet's very strictures, however, reveal that he was reacting to the actualities of war, and he openly admits the question of immunity 'has been in much debate, and is hard to determine on account of the conflicting customs that soldiers have used in these latter days'.14 Nevertheless, the concept of proportionality in waging war can be traced back at least as far as the writings of Cicero, who in his De Officiis noted that it was just to avenge wrongs done by an enemy, and to 'visit them with such retribution as justice and humanity will permit'.15 Cicero himself was well aware that since the days of the early Republic, Rome's conduct of wars and relations with other states had been overseen by the fetiales, a special college of priests whose ius fetiale governed appropriate conduct in the declaring war, the establishment and adherence to truces, and other such matters which had to be scrupulously adhered to if the war was to be just and hence merit the support of the gods. But if just retribution against an enemy should be restrained by humanity (humanitas) and balance (aequitas), Cicero admitted a significant qualification; 'The only excuse...for going to war is that we may live in peace unharmed; and when the victory is won, we should spare those who have not been blood-thirsty or barbarous in their warfare'.16 Barbarity in one's opponents, in other words, gave licence to deal with them as brutally as was deemed necessary. Whether or not the perception of many of Rome's enemies as barbarians was consciously evoked as a justification for the army's excesses as it was by Caesar for his wars against the Gauls the reality of Roman warfare against non-Romans had often been a studied ruthlessness involving the massacre of men, women and children on the fall of major towns,17 the widespread enslavement of prisoners of war, and even at times the execution of leaders after surrender.18 It was indicative of the flavour of such warfare that a consul could only be awarded a triumph if more than five thousand of the enemy had been slain.19 Ceasar could boast, doubtless with exaggeration, that on the fall of the Gallic city of Avaricum, his legionaries put 30,000 men, women and children to the sword, while Titus's sack of Jerusalem or Trajan's wars against the -

-

13 14

15

16 17

18

The Tree of Battles, p. 154. The Tree of Battles, p. 185. Marcus T. Cicero, De Officiis, 2.5.18 (hereafter cited as De Officiis); Doyne Dawson, The Origins of Western Warfare. Militarism and Morality in the Ancient World (Boulder, 1996), p. 124 (hereafter cites as Dawson, The Origins of Western Warfare). De Officiis, 1.11.34-35; Dawson, Origins of Western Warfare, p. 124. Adam Ziolkowski, "Urbs Direpta, or How the Romans Sacked Cities", in War and Society in the Roman World, eds. John Rich and Graham Shipley (London, 1993), pp. 69-91, who notes, p. 89, that in "a true direptio...troops were given free reign to murder, rape and loot". For examples see Brian Campbell, War and Society in Imperial Rome, 31 BC AD 284 (London, 2002), pp. 70-75. Dawson, Origins of Western Warfare, pp. 129, 113-14. -

19

112

Matthew Strickland

prominent campaigns, show that his conduct did not stand in isolation. Subsequently, Justinian's Digest readily accepted that prisoners of war could be enslaved.20 It was little wonder then that later medieval writers labelled war without restraint, usually fought against foes beyond the boundaries of Christendom, as bellum Romanum.2] This they contrasted with bellum hostile, waged between Christian peoples and in which the taking of prisoners, ransoming of opponents and a degree of restraint towards the enemy population was expected. The extent to which, if at all, the conversion of Constantine affected the theoretical conduct of subsequent wars waged by Rome against external or internal enemies is unclear. Because early Christianity had developed as a minority religion within the pax Romana of a pagan empire whose army was professional and voluntary, church fathers such as Origen and Tertullian were free to stress the pacifism inherent in the Gospels and to regard military service as irreconcilable with the Christian faith. It was left to Augustine, writing in the twilight of the western Empire, to reconcile Christian doctrines with necessity of defence of Rome's frontiers. Yet though he laid the foundations of a Christian just war theory, a ius ad bellum, he said little concerning appropriate conduct in such warfare. Nevertheless, echoing Cicero, he held that one of the key elements of a just war was right intent, whereby a war was to waged without hatred and with commensurate force. What this meant in practice to prisoners and noncombatants, however, was never articulated. Not only this, but restraint through right intent sat very uneasily with far more explicit statements on conduct in war found in the Old Testament, in which a God of Battles presided over a form of warfare just as ruthless, as bellum Romanum. In what was one of the earliest extant expressions of a ius in bello, the Book of Deuteronomy decreed that if a city was captured after refusing an offer of peace (and with it acceptance of subject status), all males should be put to the sword, but the women, children and cattle were to kept as spoil 'which Yahweh your God had given you'. Only trees that were not fruit bearing should be cut down for use during a siege, so that after conquest, the land would remain fruitful.22 In this case, restraint was primarily the result of material self interest, or what has been called "the plunder principle".23 Yet even such self-interested clemency was limited in its application to 'all the cities that are very far from you'. By contrast, all the people in those cities 'that Yahweh your God is going to give you as a hereditary possession' such as in the lands of the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites and others were to be completely destroyed. In what was nothing less than religiously sanctioned extirpation, the warriors were commanded, Dacians,

to cite but two

-

-

20

21 22 23

Digest, 49.15.24; 50.16.118. Stacey, "The Age of Chivalry", pp. 27-28. Deuteronomy, 20: 10-14 Civilians in the Path of War, p. xii.

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of War or War without Rules?

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'do not let anything that breathes live'. Such strictures might be put into practice: when Jericho fell to Joshua's forces 'they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox and sheep and ass with the edge of the sword'.25 Nevertheless, the influence of these pronouncements on Christian thinking about war, and still less on the actual conduct of commanders in the field, is harder to discern. When in the eleventh and twelfth centuries chroniclers spoke of a ius gentium, a lex belli, or the lex deditionis, they were in all probability referring simply to a body of recognised custom applied 'from time out of mind', developed and applied by warriors themselves with little or no reference to biblical traditions or the pronouncements of civil law. The issuing of a summons to surrender on terms by a besieger, and the assumption that if, after refusing this offer, a town or fortress was taken by storm then the lives and property of all in the city or castle were forfeit, was but one of the most prominent and ubiquitous of such customs which would subsequently be embraced by the label of droit de guerre. If the ius in bello set out in Deuteronomy reflected a context of expansion, conquest and settlement by the early Israelite tribes, so too the rapid expansion of Islam, reaching its first high water mark in the early eighth century, led to the creation of the siyar, an Islamic law of nations that developed from the shari'a, or sacred law, to govern the relationship between Muslims and non-Muslims.26 A key element in the success of Islamic conquests was the considerable degree of toleration extended to conquered civilians, the 'people under the state of citizenship' ('ahl ad-dimmah), most notably to Jews, Christians and others possessing scriptures, who were regarded as 'people of the book' ('ahl al-kitab), and for whom special taxation (jizya) guaranteed freedom of worship. There remained, nevertheless, a distinction between those of such recognized religions and 'pagans', who on refusal to convert were seen to merit execution, enslavement or ransom. Initially, the siyar had been concerned with the prosecution of jihad and with the regulation of the division of booty, but as the tide of conquest was gradually stemmed, extended periods of warfare on the frontiers of the territories of Islam (Dar al-Islam) brought the need for more complex regulation of conduct in war, including the treatment of non-combatant elements among those enemies in the 'land of war' (Dar al-Harb). Though not the earliest treatise on the siyar, that of the jurist Shaybani (d. 804), couched in the form of question and answer between Shaybani and his master Abu On these laws, see Richard D. Nelson, Deuteronomy. A Commentary (Louisville, 2002), pp. 24352; Alexander Role, "The Laws of Warfare in the Book of Deuteronomy: Their Origins, Intent and Positivity", Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 32 (1985), pp. 23-44; Edward Noort, "Das Kapitulationsangebot im Kriegsgesetz Dtn 20:1 Off. und in der Kriegserzählung", in Studies in Deuteronomy, eds. Florentino Garcia Martinez et al. (Leiden, 1994), pp. 197-222. Joshua 7: 21. A useful introduction on the siyar is given in The Islamic Law of Nations. Shaybani's Siyar, trans. Majid Khadduri (Baltimore, 1966), pp. 1-22 (hereafter cited as Shaybani's Siyar).

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Hanifa (d. 768), reveals the extent to which Islamic laws of war had developed by the late eighth century. Among the 'traditions' (hadith) or sayings attributed to the Prophet Muhammad with which Shaybani begins his work are prohibitions on the mutilation of anyone in war against the unbelievers, on the killing of any woman, and on the slaying of any children who had not reached puberty.27 There were divergent traditions concerning the killing of all adult males, but the Prophet had proclaimed it licit while equally enjoined the sparing of old men.28 Some jurists held that prisoners of war should not be killed, but could be ransomed or set free, though this opinion was disputed, and a compromise was to allow the Muslim imman discretion in the matter.29 The direct killing of the blind, the crippled and the insane was forbidden, but provision was made for 'collateral damage', as it was permitted 'to inundate a city in the territory of war with water, to bum it with fire, or to attack [its people] with mangonels, even if there may be slaves, women, old men and children in it'.30 The destruction of enemy towns and of fruit bearing trees was permitted, while if cattle or other beasts could not be driven back as spoil, they could be killed and burned to deprive the enemy of their use.31 That appropriate conduct towards those who were not warriors continued to be a matter of concern and debate among Muslim jurists is clear from the Bahr al-Fava 'id or Sea of Precious Virtues, a 'mirror for princes' compiled in Syria c. 1160 during the rule of Nur ad-Din. This reiterated that the women, children and slaves of combatants should not be killed but enslaved, but noted that 'there are two opinions concerning killing older persons among the combatants who have fallen behind, pious men and priests; but killing an elder who has advised on battle strategy is allowed'.32 Two centuries later, Honoré Bouvet came to a similar conclusion, at least in relation to wars among Christians. Old men, he mied, could only be imprisoned if they had 'given counsel and help for the conduct of the war; for sometimes an old man will be more avail by his counsel than ten soldiers'. The insane, blind and children should similarly be free from imprisonment and ransoming.33 Strikingly, however, medieval Europe was to produce nothing analogous to the siyar to govern relations between Christians and non-Christians, nor was there ever such a clearly enunciated ius in hello to regulate hostilities against the infidel. Following the collapse of the western Empire, the profoundly pacifist tendencies of the early Church still exerted a strong influence on Christian thinking about war, even if this few in the 28 29 30

31 32

33

Shaybani's Siyar, p. 87. Shaybani's Siyar, pp. 87, 92. Shaybani's Siyar, pp. 91 and n. 86, 100. Shaybani's Siyar, p. 101. If the enemy used Muslim children as a human shield, Muslim troops could attack, provided they did not aim missiles or blows intentionally at the children (ibid., p. 102).

Shaybani's Siyar, pp. 98-9. The Sea of Precious Virtues (Bahr al-Fava'id), 1991), pp. 29-30. The Tree of Battles, pp. 182-186.

ed. and trans. Julie. S. Meisami

(Salt

Lake

City,

Rules

of War or War without Rules?

115

face of the realities of warfare as practised within and between the barbarian kingdoms.34 It was reflected in Anglo-Saxon and Frankish penitential literature which continued to regard killing, even in a just war waged through the legitimate authority of a prince, as homicide which required atonement. By implication, this embraced all killing in war, but the first explicit attempt to extend ecclesiastical protection to non combatants appears to be in 697, when Abbot Adomnan of Iona devised a 'law of the innocents' (lex innocentium), which sought to protect women and children as well as clergy from the ravages of war on pain of compensation. Fifty or so kings from all over Ireland, Scottish Dalriada, and from the territories of the Picts attended the great council at Birr at which this law was promulgated, strongly implying that Adomnan had sought and gained their consent for it. 35 In seeking the necessary support of secular lords to regulate the prosecution of hostilities, as well as in such an explicit statement of the innocence and immunity of these elements of society, the council of Birr anticipated the Peace of God councils of the later tenth and eleventh centuries. Before then, however, Adomnan's law stands in virtual isolation, and it is uncertain how long its provisions remained in force. It has been long recognized that the Peace and Truce of God movement had played a highly significant role in the definition and enunciation of non-combatant status. Beginning at Le Puy in 975, a series of ecclesiastical councils had sought to extend the Church's protection to an extensive range of the most vulnerable social groups, including not only women, children and clergy but also agricultural workers and merchants, while some councils even specified that protection extended to goods, crops, olives and fruit bearing trees, livestock and even agricultural implements such as ploughs and hoes.36 Its fundamental concept was that that there should be immunity for two of the 'three orders' of medieval society, the laboratores and the oratores, from aggression by the third, the bellatores, and that all manifestations of hostilities should be restricted to direct combat between the warriors themselves. War between the milites themselves was governed by customs of war, increasingly visible from the eleventh century as a code of honourable, chivalric conduct, which was almost wholly the creation of the warrior elite themselves.37 The achievement of the ecclesiastical councils was, by contrast, to have articulated a fundamental ius in bello in respect of non-combatants, and the absorption of their canons into Gratian's Decretum in 1140 assured both their survival and their increasing dissemination. In localized 34 35 36

37

Philippe Contamine, War in the Middle Ages (London, 1984), pp. 260-270. Adomnan of Iona, Life of St Columba, trans. Richard Sharpe (London, 1995), pp. 51-2. For the Peace and Truce of God see Herbert E. J. Cowdrey, "The Peace and Truce of God in the Eleventh Century", Past and Present 46 (1970), pp. 42-67; and Thomas Head and Richard Landes, eds., The Peace of God: Social Violence and Religious Response in France around the Year 1000

(Cornell, 1992). Matthew J. Strickland, War and Chivalry. The Conduct and Perception of War in England and Normandy, 1066-1217 (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 31-54 (hereafter cited as Strickland, War and

Chivalry).

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circumstances, such as in England during the troubled reign of Stephen, regional church

councils might seek to extend similar protection to the clergy and peasantry again rendered vulnerable by the ravages of civil war and the decline in effective royal authority.38 Nevertheless, few if any canonists sought subsequently to develop the pronouncements of the Decretum itself on these issues; the Decretalists, for instance, drew back from detailed pronouncement on the question of the status and treatment of prisoners of war, and, while Aquinas' stress on proportionality in the use of force as a key element in a just war strongly implied that, according to natural law, those who did not fight had a right to protection of their lives, he did not further articulate a tangible

hello?9 Crucially,

ius in

moreover, the Peace and Truce of God legislation had been an ecclesiastical response to the implosion of Frankish society and the endemic private

and brigandage perpetrated by local castellans and their milites, itself resulting from the absence of a strong secular authority to enforce peace. Its concern was thus to seek the defence of the Church, the weak and the poor within the boundaries of western Christian principalities, but not beyond them. It has been rightly noted that, despite an idealism which flew in the face of the realities of medieval war-making, 'by defining for the first time a reasonably consistent set of non-combatant immunities, and by clearly re-iterating the principle that the conduct of war between Christians ought to be fundamentally different from the conduct of war between Christians and nonChristians, the Peace and Truce of God movements made a very significant contribution to the formation of the laws of war in western Europe'.40 The distinction in application, however, was fundamental. The pronouncement of the council of Narbonne in 1054 that 'whoever kills a Christian undoubtedly sheds the blood of Christ', was still a long way removed from the all-embracing pacifism of the early fathers and its implication was that the shedding of pagan blood was indeed licit. Nor, in contrast with the explicit pronouncements of the siyar at a comparatively early stage in the development of Islam, does there appear to have been any subsequent attempt by churchmen to articulate a ius in hello regulating the conduct of Christian warriors towards those beyond the confines of Christendom. The significance of this for conduct in transcultural wars was profound. The Carolingian wars of expansion against pagan Frisians, Saxons, Avars and other enemies in the later eighth century could be depicted as holy wars which not only validated but sanctified violence against the heathen. "If you will not accept belief in God", Saint war

Martin Brett, "Warfare and its Restraints in England, 1066-1154", in 'Militia Christi' e Crociata nei secoll XI-XIII, Attl delta undecima Settimana internazionale di studio, Mendola, 28 agosto 1 settembre 1989, Miscellanea del Centro di studi medioevali 30 (Milan, 1992), pp. 129-144, at pp. -

134-135. Frederick H. Russell, The Just War in the Middle Ages and the Non Combatant", pp. 258-9. Stacey, "The Age of Chivalry", p. 29.

(Cambridge, 1975), p. 162; Allmand, "War

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Lebuin is supposed to have warned the Saxons, "there is a king in the next country who will enter your land, conquer it and lay it waste'.41 It may be doubted if, as has recently been suggested, Charlemagne's massacre of 4,500 Saxon prisoners at Verden in 782 was inspired by biblical precedents such as King David's execution of the Moabites, though such could have afforded additional justification, but this ruthless act nonetheless marked the onset of a vicious war or attrition.42 The Frankish campaign of 791 against the Avars was preceded by three days of fasting and prayer by the army.43 Such notions of meritorious Christian warfare were powerfully reinforced by the pressing needs of defence against the incursions of heathen Magyars, Vikings and Muslims during the ninth and tenth centuries. The Saxon king Henry the Fowler, for example, was said to have carried the Holy Lance into battle against the pagan Hungarians at the battle of the Riade in 933 and his son's victory at the Lech in 955, which was followed by the execution of captured Hungarian nobles, had an equally strong flavour of holy war.44 Ecclesiastics did not necessarily condone indiscriminate violence; when in 866, for example, Pope Nicholas I sent his Consulta Bulgarorum to the Bulgars, he informed Khan Boris that now they were Christian, it was a sin to slaughter their foes and to massacre women and children, as had been their custom in the past.45 Nevertheless, what the absence of a clearly articulated ius in hello towards non-Christians might mean in practice was to be graphically revealed by the ruthless conduct frequently displayed towards Muslim opponents during the First Crusade.

War without Rules? Though the text of Admonan's lex innocentium has not survived, it may be inferred that the immunities it laid down were, like those of the later Peace and Truce of God, intended to operate essentially within the society that produced it. Nevertheless, this legislation is of considerable significance in revealing the Irish church setting its face directly against a form of war deeply rooted not only in Celtic societies but which was

42 43

44

45

Vita Lebuini, in Quellen zur Geschichte des 7. und 8 Jahrhunderts, ed. Herwig Wolfram (Darmstadt, 1982), p. 388; Alessandro Barbero, Charlemagne, Father of a Continent (Berkley, 2004), pp. 45, 43-74 (hereafter cited as Barbero, Charlemagne). Barbero, Charlemagne, p. 47. Barbero, Charlemagne, pp. 47, 68; Epistolae Karolini aevi II, ed. Emst Dümmler, MGH Epistolae (Munich, 1895), p. 528. Henry Mayr-Harting, Two Conversions to Christianity. The Bulgarians and the Anglo-Saxons (Reading, 1994), p. 17; Karl Leyser, "The Battle at the Lech, 955: A Study in Tenth-Century Warfare", in Medieval Germany and its Neighbours, ed. Karl Leyser (London, 1982), pp. 63-65. Nicolaus capitulis 106 ad Bulgarorum consulta respondet, Nicolai I. Papae Epistolae, ed. Emst Perels, MGH Epistolae Karolini Aevi 6 (Berlin, 1939), no. 99; and cf. Henry Mayr-Harting, Two Conversions to Christianity, pp. 16-23.

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endemic in much if not all of early medieval Europe and which survived until at least the twelfth century in Ireland, Britain, Scandinavia and the Baltic regions.46 In such warfare, rules governing conduct in war appear to be very few; those visible seem to have operated only within and not between the military forces of the protagonists, and were largely concerned with issues such as military discipline and the division of booty. Enemy warriors of all ranks were habitual slain on the battlefield or after capture, while the taking of heads as trophies was commonplace. Concepts of ransom, of a degree of immunity afforded to those of noble birth from summary execution, and still less notions of clemency as a virtue to be exercised by a magnanimous victor, were almost wholly absent. Given this conduct between warrior elites, it is unsurprising that equal ruthlessness was displayed to non-combatants; able-bodied men might be peremptorily slain, as were those deemed useless such as the old or sick, while survivors, often predominantly women and children, were enslaved. The Irish text The Wars between the Gaedhil and the Gael, written between 1086 and 1119, summed up such conduct by the laconic statement of the that Brian Bom's victory over Hibeirno-Norse forces in 967 was followed by 'beheading from mid-day until evening'. Similarly, after the sack of Limerick the following year, 'the whole of the captives were collected on the hills of Saingel. Every one that was fit for war was killed, and every one that was fit for a slave was enslaved'.47 Only with the Vikings, for whom war was pre-eminently a business, do we find the more widespread ransoming of nobles, leading ecclesiastics and other captives, yet here too indiscriminate killing and enslavement was as prevalent. The prevalence of massacre and enslavement has been closely linked to economic factors, particularly the lack of a developed monetary economy and the absence or paucity of towns in predominantly pastoral societies; the development of mechanisms of ransom required the circulation of considerable quantities of coin or bullion.48 For frontier societies, moreover, slaves formed a crucial element of booty, whether gained and access to a ready supply of them has been seen as a possible factor in the rise to prominence of kingdoms such as Wessex and Northumbria.49 Nevertheless, the enslaving of prisoners continued to be practised by the Anglo-Saxons after increasing urbanization and the establishment of a widespread and relatively

by war or as tribute,

For what follows, see the fuller discussion in Strickland, War and Chivalry, pp. 291-329; and Matthew J. Strickland, "Slaughter, Slavery or Ransom: the Impact of the Conquest on Conduct of Warfare", in England in the Eleventh Century, ed. Carola Hicks (Stamford, 1992), pp. 41-60. Cogadh Gaedhel re Gallaibh. The War of the Gaedhil with the Gaill, ed. James. H. Todd, Rolls Series (London, 1867), pp.76-77, 80-81. John Gillingham, "Conquering the Barbarians: War and Chivalry in Britain and Ireland", The Hasklns Society Journal 4 (1992), pp. 67-84, and repr. in John Gillingham, The English in the Twelfth Century (Woodbridge, 2000), pp. 41-58. The Anglo-Saxons, ed. James Campbell (Oxford, 1982), p. 54, and for a broader context, John R. Maddicott, "Two Frontier States: Northumbria and Wessex, c. 650-750", in The Medieval State. Essays Presented to James Campbell, eds. John R. Maddicott and David M. Palliser (London, 2000), pp. 25-46.

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sophisticated coinage, and equally by the Viking raiders and settlers seeking to exploit the more advanced economies of England and Frankia. In short, the ubiquity of slaving in early medieval Europe meant that, despite the isolated efforts of individual churchmen, immunity from violence for women, children, and other non belligerents simply did not exist in practice. Warfare between the native British peoples and their pagan Anglo-Saxon invaders, and subsequently the wars between the Christian Franks and Anglo-Saxons and their pagan Viking opponents may be said to be transcultural, in that pronounced linguistic, religious, cultural and in some cases perceived ethnic differences existed between the protagonists. By contrast, it was a religious rather than cultural distinctiveness that characterized conflict within the Anglo-Saxon heptarchy of the early seventh century between convert kingdoms such as Northumbria and still pagan ones such as Mercia. But to what extent did religious factors account for or exacerbate the brutality visible in such warfare? Regrettably little is recoverable of pre-Christian pagan attitudes to behaviour in war, still less the moral, religious or legal position of enemy women, children and those unable to fight. Certainly the sacrifice of prisoners of war had been a part of pre-Christian Celtic and Germanic societies, and even in the early thirteenth century, Henry of Livonia refers to human sacrifice among the pagan Baltic peoples, while the ritual offering of arms and horses to the gods is referred to the Livonian Rhymed Chronicle.50 Scholars have generally been uncomfortable with ascribing militant paganism to Viking raiders, but it is possible that the killing of considerable numbers of captives recorded in Frankish annals was on occasion sacrificial. We perhaps glimpse pagan Anglo-Saxon attitudes towards Christian clergy in the story related by Bede (whose manifest hostility to the British churches was his reason for its inclusion) of how the Northumbrian king Aethelfrith attacked a large group of British priests from the monastery of Bangor who had accompanied their army to Chester in order to pray for its success against the heathen Anglo-Saxons. On discovering this purpose, Aethelfrith is made to say, "If they are praying to their God against us, then, even if they do not bear arms, they are fighting against us, assailing us as they do with prayers for our defeat". Accordingly, he ordered his forces to launch their first attack against the monks, in which some 1,200 of them were supposedly slain.51 Equally, just as pagan shrines or sanctuaries such as the Saxon Irminsul destroyed by Charlemagne in 772 were a natural target for Christian armies, churches and other religious sites could be regarded by Christian enemies as much as by pagan ones as hostile powerhouses of prayer, or as the repositories of relics that might be invoked by the foe. Moreover, the concentration of moveable wealth within many churches, as well -

-

William L. Urban, "Victims of the Baltic Crusade", Journal of Baltic Studies 29 (1998), pp. 195at p. 199; The Livonian Rhymed Chronicle, trans. Jerry C. Smith and William L. Urban (Bloomington, 1977), p. 61. Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People, eds. Bertram Colgrave and Roger A. B. Mynors (Oxford, 1969), pp. 140-141, and 142 n.l (hereafter cited as Bede, Ecclesiatical History).

212,

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their frequent use as places of refuge for goods and people, made them extremely vulnerable to pillage by all enemies. Nevertheless, it may doubted whether attacks by pagan opponents such as Vikings, Saxons or Lithuanians evinced any more blatant aggression towards women, children, ecclesiastics, and churches than those by differing cultural groups who were fellow Christians. Indeed, Bede believed the conduct of the Christian British leader Cadwalla to be worse than that of his pagan ally Penda of Mercia. During the ravages inflicted on Northumbria in 633-634, Cadwalla, 'a barbarian who was even more cruel than the heathen' 'spared neither women nor innocent children. With bestial cruelty he put all to death by torture and for a long time raged through their land'.52 Adomnan had promulgated his lex innocentium precisely to counter such behaviour among the warring tribes of Ireland and Dalriada, and there is ample evidence that churches in Celtic lands were to suffer just as much from the ravages of neighbours as from Viking attacks. Indeed, in the forms of warfare outlined here, the crucial point is that recognition of a shared religion seems to have little impact per se on the treatment of either of warriors or non-combatants. Thus, for example, the laudatory biographer of the Welsh prince Gruffyd ap Cynan noted without further comment how after his victory at the battle of Mynydd Cam against Trahaim, lord of Arwystli, in 1081,

'Gruffydd set out towards Arwystli and destroyed and slew the common folk there; and he burned its houses, and bore into captivity its women and maidens. And thus he paid Trahiarn in kind. Thence he approached Powys where he showed on the journey cruelty to his opponents according to the custom of the conqueror; and he spared not so much as the churches. After thus slaying his enemies and destroying their land completely, he returned to his property...'.53 Such forms of warfare were virtually indistinguishable from those which continued to be waged by pagan cultures on the peripheries of Europe, such as in Scandinavia and the Baltic. Henry of Livonia, for example, describes how the Letts, in alliance with the German crusaders, took their revenge against the Estonians, their former overlords:

They killed those whom they found, both women and children, together with three hundred of the better men and leaders of that province, not counting innumerable others. Finally, on account of the exceedingly great slaughter of the people, the tired hands and arms of the killers failed them.. .Collecting many spoils from the villages, they took back with them beasts of burden, many flocks, and a great many girls, whom alone the army was accustomed

spare.54 It is possible that perceptions of ethnic difference fuelled the propensity to slay indiscriminately. It has been remarked, for example, that 'the Franks felt a loathing for the Avars that it would be very difficult to find in relation to any of the other peoples against whom they fought', echoed by Einhard's comment that 'all the Hun nobility to

Bede, Ecclesiastical History, pp. 202-203. The History ofGruffydd ap Cynan, trans. Arthur Jones (Manchester, 1910), pp. Henry of Livonia, trans. James Brundage (Madison, 1961), XII.6.

130-1.

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perished in this war' and that Pannonia had been left a desert. Whatever the more complex realities of settlement, alliance and intermarriage, there is evidence of a pervading bitterness between the Anglo-Saxons and the British. Though not as powerfully articulated in the extant sources as during the Anglo-Norman period, the Anglo-Saxons seem to have regarded their British neighbours as their cultural and military inferiors, at least in the first centuries of invasion and expansion. Tellingly, the Old English word wealh means both 'Welshman' and 'slave', reflecting the fate of an unknown, but doubtless substantial element of the existing British population who were overrun and reduced to servile status by the Anglo-Saxons. Bede speaks of the English in the late seventh century as having 'strong and Christian kings who were a terror to the barbarian peoples', though such neighbours must all have been Christian themselves.56 He regarded Cadwalla of Rheged as 'a barbarian in heart and disposition' despite his professed Christianity, and could believe that the British warleader was 'meaning to wipe out the whole English nation (genus Anglorum) from the land of Britain'.57 In turn, Bede saw the subjugation of the British as divine punishment for their failure to assist in the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons, and has Augustine prophesy that 'if they would not preach the way of life to the English nation, they would one day suffer the vengeance of death at their hands'.58 While this view is a particular reflection of Bede's own preoccupations, it is noteworthy that one compiler of Anglo-Saxon Chronicle chose sub anno 604 to paraphrase this story which gave divine sanction to conquest; "If the Britons do not wish to have peace with us, they shall perish at the hands of the Saxons".59 For their part, the surviving British peoples regarded the invaders with a deep hostility; according to Aldhelm, scholar and abbot of Malmesbury, the British clergy of Dumnonia refused to participate in shared worship or even eat from the same table.60 The Cymry (the collective term used by the Welsh of themselves ) expressed in their literature a powerful desire for reconquest and to drive the Anglo-Saxon invaders back into the sea, visible for example, in the poem Armes Prydein of c. 935, which looked to a pan-Celtic victory over Aethelstan of Wessex.61 Though never successful in this aim, the desire to extirpate an invader may well underlie the continuing ferocity of the treatment of non-combatants in Anglo-Welsh warfare, particularly prominent in AngloNorman accounts of the Welsh revanche of 1136. The chronicler John of Worcester

Barbero, Charlemagne, pp. 72-3; Einhard, Vita Karoli Magni, ed. Oswald Holder-Egger, MGH Scriptores Rerum Germanicarum 25, 6th ed. (Hannover and Leipzig, 1911), p. 34 56 Bede, The Ecclesiastical History, pp. 334-335. 57 Bede, The Ecclesiastical History, pp. 202-205. 58 Bede, The Ecclesiastical History, pp. 140-1. 59 "Anglo-Saxon Chronicle 'E"\ s.a 603, in English Historical Documents, c. 500-1042, ed. Dorothy Whitelock, 2nd ed. (London, 1979). 60 Aldhelmi Opera, ed. Rudolf Ehwald, MGH Auctores Antiquissimi 15 (Berlin, 1919), p. 484. 61 Armes Prydein. The Prophecy of Britain, ed. Ifor Williams, trans. Rachel Bromwich (Dublin, 1972). .

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noted in this year that 'the Welsh invaded by force, violently destroyed churches, townships, crops and beasts far and wide, burnt down castles and other fortifications, slew, scattered, and sold into captivity abroad innumerable men, both rich and poor'.62 Cultural norms which excused ruthless treatment of the wounded and the womenfolk of the enemy, or even exulted in it, were so deeply rooted that they survived in Celtic society into the sixteenth century. A vivid echo of the ethnic hatred towards the invader is provided by an anonymous Gaelic poet addressing Archibald, earl of Argyll, before the battle of Flodden in 1513, between King James IV of Scotland and the English: 'Let us make harsh and mighty warfare against the English.. .The roots from which they grow, destroy them, their increase is too great, and leave no Englishman alive after you nor Englishwoman there to tell the tale. Burn their bad coarse women, bum their uncouth offspring, and bum their sooty houses, and rid us of the reproach of them. Let their ashes float down-stream after burning their remains, show no mercy to a living Englishmen, O chief, deadly slayer of the wounded...'63

Such were the attitudes to war which the Norman conquerors of Anglo-Saxon England encountered among their Celtic neighbours, and their subsequent expansion of FrancoNorman settlers into Wales, Scotland and Ireland led to a direct clash of cultural perceptions concerning conduct in warfare. Our second model thus briefly explores the effects of a clash between societies on the peripheries of Europe still waging war in an unrestrained manner with those in which more developed customs of war and notions of restraint had developed.

The Clash of Divergent Customs in War: Anglo-Celtic Warfare By the late eleventh century, the conduct of inter-cultural warfare within and between the territorial principalities of France was directly affected by a number of key factors.64 The Chronicle of John of Worcester, eds. Reginald R. Darlington and Patrick McGurk, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1995-98), III: 116. Similarly, the Gesta Stephani noted how during the major rising against the Normans in 1136, the Welsh "with shouts and arrows they pitifully slaughtered some, others they massacred by driving them violently into a river, a good number they put in houses and churches to which they set fire and burnt...old men they exposed to slaughter or mockery; the young of both sexes they delivered over to chains and captivity; women of any age they shamefully abandoned to public violation" (Gesta Stephani, eds. Kenneth R. Potter and Ralph C. Davis (Oxford, 1976), pp. 17-19). A Celtic Miscellany, ed. Kenneth H. Jackson (Harmonsworth, 1971), pp. 239-241. For further discussion of the following themes, Matthew J. Strickland, "Killing or Clemency? Ransom, Chivalry and the Changing attitudes to Defeated Opponents in Britain and Northern France, 7-12th Centuries", in Krieg im Mittelalter, ed. Hans-Henning Kortüm (Berlin, 2001), pp. 93-122.

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First, the sparing of noble opponents when captured and the ransoming of warriors had

increasingly commonplace. Clemency was now valued as a knightly as well as kingly virtue, though such restraint from killing normally only operated between members of the knighthood or militia, and was not considered to extend to the common infantry. Secondly, the rapid proliferation of castles around c. 1000 led to widespread dissemination and development of customs relating to negotiated surrender, whereby defenders might be granted respite to seek relief before yielding on terms to safeguard life, limbs and sometimes property. Such conventions played an increasing important role in the prosecution of war and its restraint. Thirdly, the Church in western Europe did succeed in gradually stamping out the enslavement of prisoners of war who were fellow Christians. By the time the Normans invaded England, such behaviour was regarded as illicit, and William the Conqueror's reign was to see a sustained attempt by Anglo-Norman ecclesiastics to halt the slave trade between England and Ireland. Not only was the enslavement of captives forbidden, but, as we have already noted, the Peace and Truce of God legislation had gone far in attempting to establish immunity from violence for non-combatants. How far such protection was observed in practice, of course, was another matter, and those regarded as rebels were certainly placed beyond it. No where is this more graphically revealed than in William the Conqueror's infamous 'harrying of the North' in 1069-70, in which he punished the rebellious northern shires of England and sought to break their ability to resist by the systematic devastation of the land and the killing of its inhabitants. It has been estimated from the record of the Domesday Book in 1086 that Yorkshire alone, which bore the brunt of the ravaging, had suffered a deficit of 75% of its plough teams and population as recorded become a

in 1066, which may have amounted to at least 80,000 oxen, and 150,000 people.65 Nevertheless, the outlawing of slavery and the perception that the indiscriminate

slaughter of non-combatants was unchivalric marked a fundamental shift in the perception of war from earlier attitudes, and may well have offered a significant amelioration in the fate of the inermes during hostilities.66 The chivalric ethos imported into England by the Franco-Norman warrior aristocracy, however, stood in stark contrast to the execution of warriors taken in battle, indiscriminate slaughter and slaving which continued in Wales, Ireland and in Galloway well into the twelfth century, as barbarous. Such behaviour, coupled with differences in language, sexual mores, 'backward' religious practices and only rudimentary economic and social organization led the Anglo-Normans to perceive their Celtic opponents as barbarians, and as John Gillingham has cogently argued, such John J. N. Palmer, "War and Domesday Waste", in Armies, Chivalry and Warfare in Medieval Britain and France, ed. Matthew J. Strickland (Stamford, 1998), pp. 256-75, at pp. 273-4. Strickland, War and Chivalry, p. 310-312; John Gillingham, "Conquering the Barbarians: War and Chivalry in Twelfth Century Britain and Ireland", The Haskins Society Journal 4 (1992), pp. 6784, repr. in John Gillingham, The English in the Twelfth Century (Woodbridge, 2000), pp. 41-58, at p. 55.

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characterisation

played a key role in justifying Anglo-Norman imperialism within Britain.67 Slaving, the destruction of churches and other atrocities (whether real or imagined) could even lead to the proclamation of a holy war against the Scottish invaders, 'worse than pagans', in 1138. In a pre-battle oration put into the mouth of the great Anglo-Norman lord Walter Espec, the Cistercian abbot Ailred of Rievaulx bids his men to "sanctify your hands in the blood of sinners, for happy are those whom Christ has chosen to avenge his wrongs", and to extirpate the hateful barbarian

enemy.6

Celtic enemies were accordingly seen to be beyond the restraints of chivalric warfare. An enemy who gave no quarter or who took none for ransom should be paid in his own coin, whatever the dictates of chivalry in war between Anglo-Norman themselves. In his Expugnatio Hibernica, Gerald of Wales has Hervey de Montmorency justify his advice to his fellow Anglo-Normans to slaughter all their Irish prisoners, taken in battle near Waterford in 1169, with the words, "If, when they came out in battle array to vanquish us, they had been victorious, surely they would not now make any concession to us out of pity? Surely they would not allow the vanquished to purchase their lives? Surely they would not free their prisoners for ransom?"69 Contact with Celtic peoples and their methods of war could thus lead to a brutalisation of the conduct of war by the Anglo-Norman marcher lords themselves. In his summary of events in Ireland in 1185, Gerald of Wales noted laconically, 'a hundred heads sent to Dublin'.70 Similarly, as Frederick Suppe has argued, Anglo-Norman response to raiding on the Welsh marches was characterized by the massacre or mutilation of prisoners, and even the collecting of heads, which in tum only provoked bloody reprisals.71 In 1245, for example, Matthew Paris recounts how the Welsh took alive some English knights, intending to imprison them, 'but hearing that we had slain some of their nobles, and above all, Naveth son of Odo, a handsome and brave youth, they also hung these knights of ours, afterwards decapitating and mangling them dreadfully: finally they tore their miserable corpses limb from limb, and threw them into the water, in detestation at their wicked greediness in not sparing the church...'72 Even women might be involved in such atrocities. According to the Song of Dermot and the Earl, a women whose lover John

Gillingham, "The Beginnings of English Imperialism", Journal of Historical Sociology 5 (1992), pp. 392- 407, repr. in Gillingham, The English in the Twelfth Century, pp. 3-18; and idem., "Conquering the Barbarians", pp. 41-58. Ailred of Rievaulx, "Relatio de Standardo", in Chronicles of the Reigns of Stephen, Heniy II and Richard I, ed. Richard Howlett, Rolls Series (London, 1884-1889), III, pp. 187-189. Giraldus Cambrensis, Expugnatio Hibernica, eds. Alexander B. Scott and Francis X. Martin (Dublin, 1978), pp. 62-65. Expugnatio Hibernica, pp. 234-235. Frederick C. Suppe, "The Cultural Significance of Decapitation in High Medieval Wales and the Marches", Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies 36 (1989), pp. 147-160. Matthaei Parislensis monachi Sancti Albani Chronica Majora, ed. Henry R. Luard, 6 vols. (London, 1872-1883), II, pp. 110-11.

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had been killed in the battle helped behead the Irish captives taken at Waterford in 1169.73 As late as 1402, Thomas Walsingham believed that following Owain Glyn Dwr's defeat of the men of Hereford, the Welsh women had mutilated the slain by cutting off their genitals and noses, then mockingly re-arranging them.74 Ruthlessness could be exacerbated when the invaders allied with native peoples thirsting for vengeance against an old oppressor. We have already noted this phenomenon in regard to the alliance of the Baltic Letts with the German crusaders against the Estonians, and the same pattern is visible in Wales and in Ireland. The History of Gruffydd ap Cynan described the attack on Gwynedd by Hugh of Chester, aided by Gwrgan ap Seisyll and the men of Powys. In Lleyn cantred 'they encamped for a fortnight, daily destroying and plundering and murdering. They left behind them a great slaughter of corpses. Then the country was a desert for eight years...this was the first plague and rough advent of the Normans to the land of Gwynedd after coming to England'.75 That such ravaging could involve pre-meditated killing of all elements of society is graphically revealed by the Brut y Tywysogion's account of how in 1116, a force of Welsh loyal to Henry I, together with Anglo-Norman troops, marched on Ystrad Twyi in order to capture Gruffyd ap Rhys, every man swore 'that he was not to spare the sword against man or woman, boy or girl, and whomsoever they caught they were not to let him go without killing him, or hanging him, or cutting off his members'.76 Similarly, Gerald of Wales noted how in 1169 with aid of the AngloNormans, Diarmait Mac Murchada defeated the men of Osraige his old enemies; after FitzStephen's knights had routed their formation, Dairmait's men followed, beheading the fallen and bringing their king some two hundred heads. Thereafter, the allies 'several times penetrated to the more remote and innermost parts of the region, vigorously pursuing a policy of slaughter, burning and plunder'.77 The deliberate targeting of a region's inhabitants highlights a crucial factor determining the treatment of non-combatants in these theatres of war. For economic devastation, including the killing of peasantry, was one of the very few means of waging war against opponents who employed guerrilla tactics, who came only gradually if at all to adopt the use of castles and strongholds, and whose lands were marked by the paucity or absence of substantial towns. There were thus fewer static military targets, and fewer opportunities for civilians to gain the limited protection that the customs of war afforded through the surrender of fortified places on terms. Local inhabitants in parts of Wales and Scotland may have enjoyed a degree of de facto -

-

The Song ofDermot and the Earl, ed. Goddard H. Orpen (Oxford, 1892), pp. 110-111. Thomae Walsingham, quondam monachi Sancti Albani, Historia Anglicana, ed. Henry T. Riley, 2 vols., Rolls Series (London, 1863-1864), II, p. 250. The History of Gruffydd ap Cynan, pp. 122-25. Brut Y Tywysogyon, or The Chronicles of the Princes. Red Book of Hergest Version, ed. Thomas Jones (Cardiff, 1955), pp. 96-97 Expugnatio Hibernica, pp. 36-37.

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security

from Anglo-Norman military action because of their ability to seek refuge in wooded or mountainous terrain that was all but impenetrable. Thus, for example, until the final onslaughts of Edward I, the princes of Gwynedd were able to withdraw many of their people long accustomed to the practice of transhumance into the fastness of Snowdonia, while similar mass evacuations could occur in other parts of Wales.78 Similarly, the kings of Scots were at times able to effect the partial evacuation of the lowlands of Scotland in the face of advancing English armies. Nevertheless, the great majority of major Anglo-Norman expeditions into Wales or lowland Scotland before the reign of Edward I aimed not to conquer, but merely to overawe and punish; if the enemy's forces could not be brought to battle, frustrations were vented on any of the populace unlucky enough to remained within reach, as well as on churches and abbeys and on occasion, on hostages. In this, the Normans were merely continuing earlier Anglo-Saxon practice. Though few contemporary details survive of Harold Godwineson's expedition of 1063 against the north Welsh, it was remembered in the next century by as a model campaign, epitomized by a successful combination of the deployment of lightly armed troops with utter ruthlessness. In his Policraticus, completed in 1159, John of Salisbury noted approvingly of Harold's devastation of Snowdonia that 'slaying every male who could be found, even down to pitiful little boys, he thus pacified the province at the mouth of the sword'.79 Gerald of Wales similarly noted that Harold had 'lived on the country, and marched up and down and round and about the whole of Wales with such energy that "he left not one that pisseth against a wall" [I Samuel 25.22, I Kings 16.11]'.80 In the early stages of their penetration into Wales, some of the Norman marcher lords seem even to have enslaved captured Welsh, though this practice did not long continue and earned the condemnation of clerical writers such as Orderic Vitalis. The attitude of the Church itself to such conduct was clearly revealed in 1138, when the papal legate Alberic of Ostia demanded from a politically embarrassed King David I that the Scots and Galwegians who had invaded northern England that year returned any captives they had enslaved, and extracted a pledge that they would henceforth abstain from the killing of non-combatants. Such strictures were not observed for long, however, while ironically, ecclesiastical prohibition on the taking of prisoners as slaves, coupled with the economic poverty of Wales and Scotland, may have actually exacerbated the brutality with which Anglo-Norman forces treated non-combatants in these areas. For the Welsh, Irish and Scots, by contrast, the continuing practice of slaughtering non-combatants can be seen as a reflection of their comparative military weakness in relation to their Anglo-Norman opponents. Frequently lacking developed siege -

-

See the examples cited in The History of Gruffydd ap Cynan, p. 168, n.2. Ioannes Sarisberiensis, Policraticus, Book VI, c.6; The Statesman's Book of John of Salisbury, trans. John Dickinson (New York, 1927), pp. 194-5. Itinerarium Kambrlae (Descriptio, Bk II, c. vii), p. 217; trans. Lewis Thorpe, The Journey Through Wales, p. 266.

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127

technology, their armies were often unable to take major castles or fortified towns by siege, save by stealth, ruse or prolonged blockade. To offset this imbalance, raiding and ravaging, which could by-pass major strong points, could inflict serious economic damage and act as a calculated form of terror. The Scottish invasions of 1138, of 1173 and 1174, and of 1296 and 1297 show limited success against fortified places offset by systematic ravaging of the northern counties, in which the 'soft' targets of noncombatants and their livestock were the principal victims. Detailed data on the kind of damage inflicted is not available until the harrying of Cumbria and parts of Northumbria by William Wallace in 1297, but this reveals the destruction of numerous vills and the killing of husbandmen.81 By contrast, when during the reign of Edward II the Scots under Robert Bruce enjoyed a marked military superiority and were capable of raiding at will deep into northern England, the treatment of non-combatants witnessed a marked shift. While much plunder continued to be taken, particularly in livestock, habitual killing was now replaced by the systematic holding to ransom of villages, towns or even whole shires, who paid to spare their inhabitants from the sword and fire.82 Crucially too, this war was not, as in had been in earlier Anglo-Scottish conflicts, about territorial possession of the northern shires, but rather to obtain recognition by the English crown of Scotland's independence and of the legitimacy of Brace's kingship. Sparing the local population, who might live another day to buy off future Scottish armies, not only made war pay handsomely, but by bringing the social, economic and political structure of northern England to its knees exerted far more effective pressure on their opponents for the realisation of their ultimate goal than mere ravaging had done. By demonstrating restraint and magnanimity, moreover, Brace not only demonstrated his authority and control over the military forces of Scotland but also sought to reinforce the legitimacy of his kingship.83

2

3

Colm J. McNamee, "William Wallace's Invasion of Northern England, 1297", Northern History 26 (1990), pp. 45-58. Jean Scammell, "Robert I and the North of England", English Historical Review 73 (1958), pp. 385-403; and Matthew J. Strickland, "The Law of Arms or the Law of Treason? Conduct in War in Edward I's Campaigns in Scotland, 1296-1307", in Violence in Medieval Society, ed. Richard W. Kaeuper (Woodbridge, 2000), pp. 39-77, at pp. 47-48. There is a striking parallel here with the conduct of George Washington during the War of Independence, who, in the words of Sir Michael Howard, "was at pains to show, by the professional behaviour of American armies, that the United States had the right to be treated as a sovereign state". This, however, contrasted with "the ferocious banditry into which the war degenerated at the fringes, as it is always liable to do when irregular belligerents escape professional control" (Howard, "Constraints on Warfare", p. 5).

Matthew Strickland

128

War between cultures possessing war: Frankish-Muslim Warfare William of

religions

developed customs of

Tyre, as we have noted, believed that wars waged by those of different always more bitterly fought than those between those of shared faith and

were

cultures. Yet from the outset, the nature of Frankish-Muslim relations in the Latin East was complex and conduct in war could differ widely depending on time, place and circumstances.84 Nor, indeed, could the intensity of religious motivation itself be a constant; the zeal of newly arrived westerners, for example, could contrast with the more pragmatic attitude of the pullani, those Franks resident in Outremer, while the response to the developing propaganda of jihad under Nur ad-Din and Saladin must have varied significantly within Muslim territories. Fundamental religious tensions, moreover, were to varying degrees mitigated by a number of factors affecting the prosecution of warfare. Crucially, more highly developed customs of war were in operation between the Franks and the Muslims in the Levant than visible between the Anglo-Normans and their Celtic enemies during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. With the failure of new expeditions in the first decades of the twelfth century, the tide of conquest achieved by the First Crusade had been stemmed, forcing the establishment of a modus vivendi with neighbouring Muslim principalities. The crusaders' initial successes had been the result of political divisions within Islam rather than their enjoyment of an overwhelming military superiority. Hence although the tactics and composition of Frankish and Muslim armies differed markedly, there was sufficient parity in military technology in terms of armour, weapons and above all fortifications and siegecraft to result in long periods during which neither side was able to obtain a sustained and decisive military advantage.85 From an early stage, the need to regulate interaction between the Muslims and Franks led to the application and development of conventions of surrender (lex deditionis), truces (lex pactorum), ransom, the exchange of hostages and the formal declaration of hostile intent before engaging in warfare. Did the Franks bring knowledge of such conventions with them to the East in 1096, or did they instead come rapidly to assimilate them through contact with the Muslims? Yaacov Lev, "Prisoners of War During the Fatimid-Ayyubid Wars with the Crusaders", in Tolerance and Intolerance. Social Conflict in the Age of the Crusaders, eds. Michael Gervers and James M. Powell (Syracuse, N.Y., 2001), pp. 11-27; Yvonne Friedman, Encounter Between Enemies: Captivity and Ransom in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem (Leiden, 2002) (hereafter cited as Friedman, Encounter Between Ennemies); Carole Hillenbrand, The Crusades. Islamic Perspectives (Edinburgh, 1999), pp. 549-556. This is not, of course, to suggest a stasis in military development, but rather the maintenance of a general equilibrium as respective changes in technology occurred. For but one example, see Ronnie Ellenblum, "Frankish and Muslim Siege Warfare and the Construction of Frankish Concentric Castles", in Gesta Dei per Francos. Crusade Studies in Honour of Jean Richard, eds. Michel Balard, Benjamin Z. Kedar and Jonathan Riley-Smith (Aldershot, 2001), pp. 187-98.

Rules

129

of War or War without Rules?

An eminent historian of Muslim-Christian relations during the crusades has recently argued that 'the chivalrous concept of showing mercy to a vanquished enemy was probably not yet part of the common legacy the crusaders brought with them from the

West, although this idea

was

beginning

to

gain momentum".86 Instead, she suggests

that the spread of the conventions of ransom was either a parallel development in the East or West or it may even be possible that the crusaders were the first to absorb these mores in the East and that western chivalry learned it from returning crusaders. In the case of ethical laws, the crusaders do not seem to have come with a clear set of conventions and customs. Restraint practised in war, if it was learned at all, grew out of the everyday situation in the East and the growth of a social ordo of chivalry'.87

to concur with such a view. Certainly, as Yvonne Friedman Orderic Vitalis's famous account of the battle of Brémule in 1119, in which points out, he notes that the Anglo-Norman and Capetian knights spared each other through a shared sense of a brotherhood in arms and Christian piety, refers to events over twenty years after the launch of the First Crusade.88 But elsewhere he reveals the operation of ransom, clemency and chivalric restraint in earlier contexts. Thus, for example, Orderic speaks of the riches gained from the ransom of Norman knights by the garrison of Sainte Suzanne in Maine in c. 1084, well before Urban II had preached at Clermont.89 He believed that at Chaumont in 1098 the French defenders took care not to kill William Rufus' knights, but only to slay their horses with arrows, while at Ballon in the same year Rufus released his knightly captives on parole, certain that their honour would ensure they return to pay their ransoms.90 The siege of Le Mans, concluded in 1100, likewise reveals developed notions of chivalrous restraint and a brotherhood in arms between the Manceaux and the Normans. Such conventions could scarcely develop so quickly as a result of the crusaders' experience in the east. It might be argued that Orderic was merely imbuing earlier events with chivalric notions he had come himself to know during the early decades of the twelfth century, but this seems most unlikely; the location of St Évroult on the southern border of Normandy meant that Orderic had access to particular detailed information concerning these events, and many of his informants were knights themselves, some of whom had taken the habit at St Évroult itself.91

It is

difficult, however,

Yvonne Friedman, "Did Laws of War Exist in the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem?", in De Sion Exibit Lex et Verbutn Domini de Hierusalem: Essays on Medieval Law, Liturgy and Literature in Honour ofAmnon Linder, ed. Yitzak Hen (Turnhout, 2001), pp. 81-102, at p. 99 These arguments are also incorporated in Friedman, Encounter Between Enemies, pp. 55-72. Dr. Friedman's important thesis deserves a much fuller discussion than is possible in this present overview. Friedman, "Did Laws of War Exist?", p. 99. The Ecclesiastical History of Orderic Vitalis, ed. Marjorie Chibnall, 6 vols (Oxford, 1969-1980), VI, pp. 240-241 (hereafter cited as Orderic). Orderic, V, pp. 48-49. Orderic, V, pp. 218-219, 244-245. For St Évroult see Marjorie Chibnall, The World of Orderic Vitalis (Woodbridge, 1994). .

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I would thus argue that the members of the Frankish warrior aristocracy who embarked on the First Crusade were already familiar with comparatively developed customs of war and with notions of what, in conflicts between fellow Frankish milites, constituted honourable restraint.92 Whether or not they observed its strictures, they were also well aware of the Peace and Truce of God legislation and the clear expressions of non-combatant immunity they contained; in Normandy, for example, the earlier Peace promulgated at Caen, probably in 1047, was again proclaimed in an extended form by at the council of Rouen in 1096.93 The crucial question in this context is hence not whether the Franks had developed conventions which restrained war before 1096, but to what extent, if at all, they believed these restraints applied to the Muslim infidel? The course of the First Crusade, which witnessed the ruthless sacking of a number of towns and cities such as Ma'arat a-Numan 1098, and most notoriously Jerusalem in 1099, has often been seen as reflecting an implacable enmity and brutality towards a despised yet largely unknown enemy, a state of mind which only gave way to more restrained conduct during the twelfth century as the new crusader states were forced to come to terms with their Muslim neighbours. Nevertheless, interpretations of Frankish conduct on the First Crusade have differed markedly. One the one hand, the Franks can be seen to have acted with unrestrained ruthlessness, with the deliberate intent of purging the holy places from the pollution of the pagans.94 At Jerusalem, the slaughter of Muslims and Jews was not simply a question of indiscipline following the storming of a city, but a calculated policy; Albert of Aachen believed that after taking counsel, the Frankish leaders ordered that all prisoners, including women and children, taken during the initial sack were to be executed.95 On the other, however, it has been argued that the blood-lust of the crusaders and the extent of killing in 1096-1099 was greatly exaggerated by ecclesiastical chroniclers keen to portray their deeds as a process of religious cleansing and purification, and who often fail to distinguish between the killing of adult males and the fate of others. In fact, women and children were usually kept as booty to be ransomed or enslaved, and even at Jerusalem, there is evidence that many of the inhabitants were taken captive rather than slain.96 Indeed, the testimony of Albert of Aachen implies that the instinct of many of the crusaders on the fall of Jerusalem had been to take prisoners for ransom, and that some of them had already been redeemed. The order to kill all the captives was a pragmatic one, given because the Frankish leaders feared that if they were to be

important observations on Frankish customs relating to booty see William G. Zajac, "Captured Property on the First Crusade", in The First Crusade, Origins and Impact, ed. Jonathan Philips For

(Manchester, 1997), pp. 153-80. Orderic, V, pp. 18-22; Brett, "Warfare and its Restraints", pp. 130-133. Friedman, Encounter Between Enemies, pp. 13-20. Friedman, Encounter Between Enemies, p. 18. David Hay, "Gender Bias and Religious Intolerance in Accounts of the 'Massacres' of the First Crusade", in Tolerance and Intolerance, pp. 3-10.

Rules

of War or War without Rules?

attacked

131

by the Egyptians, they would be overwhelmed by the multitude of the

enemy At Albara in 1098, the Franks killed some of the inhabitants, enslaved others but set free those who had surrendered before the town fell.98 Whatever the motivations of the first crusaders, however, pragmatic factors ensured that the widespread killing even of male populations would become comparatively rare. From an early stage in the Frankish settlement, it become apparent that there was a critical shortage of manpower in the crusader states, resulting from the failure effectively to colonise the newly won territories a failure that was to characterise the entire period of Frankish occupation. Accordingly, there was a pressing concern to retain the indigenous population. The fate of the rural Muslim communities of Syria and Palestine is hard to trace, but a priori given the paucity of Frankish settlers, the desire of the new Latin lords for rents, taxes and labour services from a subject peasantry must have tempered ethnic and religious hostilities. The survival of Muslim settlements around Nablus until the mid-twelfth century (when oppressive taxation finally forced them to leave for Damascus) was probably not an isolated example.99 The attempt to retain urban populations or neighbouring farmers working to supply towns with produce is clearly visible by 1110, when the Franks and Norwegians besieged Sidon. 'The enemy within the walls were so terrified', noted Fulcher of Chartres, 'that the garrison of mercenaries begged of King Baldwin that he permit them to go forth safely, and if he pleased he might retain in the city the peasants (agricolae) because of their usefulness in cultivating the land'.100 As in many other theatres of war, however, the desire by rulers to retain mercantile or other civilian elements was often at odds with the desire for booty obtained from an assault and sack. The year previously, 1109, the defenders of Tripoli had surrendered on terms, 'sealed by oaths and confirmed by the king' providing that 'the Saracens should not be killed but might go wherever they wished without being forbidden'. Despite this, the Genoese scaled the walls and beheaded any Muslims they found in a vicious sack.101 Only those near King Baldwin 'were protected according to the agreement'.102 At Jaffa in 1192, the collapse of part of the town wall led to the Muslims

prisoners.97

-

Albert of Aachen, Chronicon Hierosolymitanum, vol. VI, 29-30, cited by Friedman, Encounter Between Enemies, p. 18, from the forthcoming edition by Dr Sue Edgington. Raymond d'Aguilers, Liber, ed. John Hugh and Lauritia Hill (Paris, 1969), p. 91; Hay, "Gender Bias and Religious Intolerance", p. 4. Benjamin Z. Kedar, "The Subjected Muslims of the Frankish Levant", in Muslims under Latin Rule, 1100-1300, ed. James M. Powell (Princeton, 1990), pp. 135-174. Fulcheri Cartonensis Historia Hierosolymitana (1095-1127), ed. Heinrich Hagenmeyer (Heidelberg, 1913) II: XLIV (hereafter cited as Fulcher); transi. Frances R. Ryan and Harold S. Fink as A History of the Expedition to Jerusalem, 1095 -1127 (Knoxville, 1969), pp. 199-200 (hereafter cited

Ryan). al-Qalanisi, The 1932), pp. 89-90.

as

Ibn

Damascus Chronicle

Fulcher II: XLI; trans.

Ryan, pp. 195-6.

of the Crusades,

ed. Hamilton A. R. Gibb

(London,

132

Matthew Strickland

sacking

the town during surrender negotiations. When the Frankish envoy asked Saladin to stop his men until he could return with the terms, he replied, "I cannot hold the Muslims back from this business, but go into your comrades and tell them that they should retire into the citadel and leave my men a free hand in the town. There is no way of defending it any more". When the defenders of the citadel finally prepared to surrender, Saladin's son expressed concern for their safety at the hands of the illdisciplined Muslim forces in the town.103 In their tum, the Muslims might display similar concerns to retain the cultivators of the land. Ibn al-Athir, for example, records how after Edessa fell to Zangi, atabeg of Mosul in 1144: The citizens and their goods were seized, the young taken captive, the men killed. But when Zangi inspected the city he liked it and realized that it would not be sound policy to reduce such a place to ruins. He therefore gave the order that his men should return every man, woman and child to his home together with the goods and chattels looted from them. This was done in all but a very few cases, in which the captor had already left them camp.104

high-tide of Muslim reconquest under the Mamlukes, the desire to agrarian populace is apparent. In 1271, the Sultan Baybars stormed the crusader fortress of Krak des Chevaliers, 'massacring the Hospitallers, taking great prisoner the mountaineers, but letting the villages go free to keep up cultivation'.105 Nevertheless, the expulsion of Franks from towns and cities also featured as part of a process of Muslim reconquest. At Edessa, Zangi had allowed non-western Christians to remain, but expelled the Franks. Likewise after his crashing defeat of the army of King Guy at Hattin in 1187, Saladin allowed the populations of many of the Frankish held towns and cities to leave.106 Strategic as much as humanitarian factors led to such clemency, for generous terms of surrender facilitated speedy conquest before significant aid could arrive from the West, and in the longer term, made the process of Frankish reconquest far more difficult. Indeed, one of the chief reasons why the army of Richard the Lionheart was forced to desist from the siege of Jerusalem in 1191-2 was that, although they twice came within sight of the holy city, the king and the Syrian Franks who advised him to withdraw realized that even if they could take the city by force, they lacked sufficient manpower to garrison it effectively once the majority of Even in the safeguard the

the crusaders had returned to the west.

Baha al-Din Ibn Shaddad, The Rare and Excellent History of Saladin, transi. Donald S. Richards (Aldershot, 2002), p. 220. Ibn al-Athir, XI, 64-6, in Francesco Gabrieli, Arab Historians of the Crusades (New York, 1969) p. 52 (hereafter cited as Gabrieli, Arab Historians). David J. Cathcart King, "The Taking of Krak des Chevaliers in 1271", Antiquity 23 (1949), pp. 8392. For Saladin's actions after Hattin, Malcolm C. Holy War (Cambridge, 1982), pp. 267-294.

Lyons and David Jackson, Saladin.

The Politics

of

Rules of War or War without Rules?

133

At Jerusalem in 1187, however, it had seemed initially as if Saladin would make an exception to his normal willingness to allow the Franks freedom to leave unmolested. Instead, he began by refusing the terms sought by the garrison and threatened to revenge the atrocities believed to have been committed by the Franks in 1099 by massacring the entire male population. As Ibn al-Athir has him say, '"We shall deal with you", he said, just as you dealt with the population of Jerusalem when you took it in 492 (1099), with murder and enslavement and other such savageries.'"107 Similarly, Saladin's secretary Imad al-Din has the sultan tell the defenders of Jerusalem, '"Neither amnesty or mercy for you!...We shall kill and capture you wholesale, spill men's blood and reduce the poor and women to slavery'".108 Even here, however, the Muslim chroniclers follow the pronouncements of the siyar in regarding it as axiomatic that only menfolk were to be slain, and that women were to be enslaved. In the event, Saladin was dissuaded from such a course, not least by the counter-threats of the Frankish garrison to kill not only all their Muslim prisoners but also their own wives and children, horses and animals. They would then destroy the Muslim holy places in the city before sallying out to fight to the last man.109 Whether because of this threat, or the desire to gain the ultimate goal of his long proclaimed jihad without further blood shed, he agreed on a set ransom for each man, woman or child, a head-tax whose value was increased by that fact that Jerusalem was swollen with refugees from Darum, Ramla, Gaza and other towns abandoned during the collapse of the Frankish kingdom. The Franks who could afford to pay the ransom were allowed to leave, while those who could not were enslaved. Orthodox and other Christian minorities, however, who had been largely antipathetical to the western Christians and who preferred Muslim rule, were permitted to remain; Saladin's jihad was directed at the Franks, who were seen as posing the greatest threat to Islam. Saladin's treatment of the population of Jerusalem is a key example of how non-combatants were affected by a combination of mutually recognized conventions of surrender and the co-existing practices of ransom and enslavement: "

'The Sultan agreed to

give the Franks assurances of safety on the understanding that each

alike, should pay ten dinar, children of both sexes two dinar, and women five dinar. All who paid this sum within forty days should go free, and those who had not paid at the end of the time should be enslaved. Balian ibdn Barzan [Balian of Ibelin, the Frankish leader of the city] offered 30,000 dinar for the poor, which was accepted. An man, rich and poor

indication of the numbers is the fact that most of them paid the ransom, and Balian ibn Barzan freed 18,000, for whom he paid the 30,000, yet apart from all these the number of

Gabrieli, Arab Historians, p. 141. Gabrieli, Arab Historians, p. 156. Gabrieli, Arab Historians, pp. 141-2 (Ibn al-Athir), pp. 156-7 (Imad al-Din). Ibn al-Athir noted that the Franks held 5000 Muslim captives at the time, though this may well be a considerable

exaggeration.

Matthew Strickland

134 those who could not pay and were taken prisoner came to women and children.'"0

exactly 16,000 persons, men,

The fate of these last Frankish captives underlines what was surely the single most important factor in the treatment of non-combatants in Muslim-Frankish warfare, namely the widespread operation of slavery. Having left a society in which the practice of enslaving fellow Christians had all but ceased, the Franks of the First Crusade found in the Levant another in which slavery was still flourishing. Canon law neither overtly condoned nor condemned the enslavement of non-Christians, and the Franks quickly came to adopt the indigenous practice of selling captives as an important aspect of booty and the profits of war. Such a pattern was thus the direct opposite of what can be observed in warfare between the Anglo-Normans and the Celts. Both Christian and Muslim prisoners might be used for forced labour, particularly on fortifications. Fulcher also records how captured Muslim women were set to work using hand mills, while Christian prisoners are recorded as being set to work in the storehouses and mills of the Fatimid palace at Cairo.111 Rape and the sexual exploitation of female captives was widespread;112 one hadith stipulated that if a woman taken as spoil was pregnant, a Muslim should refrain from intercourse with her, implying that it was licit in other circumstances."3 As in other theatres of war, the logistical difficulties of moving considerable numbers of captives might lead to acts of ruthless killing. The Muslim jurist Abu Hanifa mied that if prisoners were unable to walk and there were problems obtaining transport, the men should be killed, but transport should be hired for the and in part perhaps because of the absence of any women and children."4 By contrast Franks in certain circumstances not to have scrupled of the the seem siyar equivalent believed that after defeating the army of Fulcher of Chartres in killing Muslim women. Kerbogha, atabeg of Mosul in 1098, the Franks overran the Turkish camp; 'in regard to the women found in the tents of the foe the Franks did them no evil but drove lances into their bellies'. 115 Similarly, having executed some 200 Muslims who had been robbing pilgrims, Baldwin I smoked out their women and children from caves at Azopart after they refused to give themselves up; some of the women and their children -

-

were 110

111 112

ransomed, some were beheaded.116

Gabrieli, Arab Historians, pp. 142-3. Ibn al-Athir believed that the Franks in Jerusalem then numbered 70,000, probably a great exaggeration, but the numbers were certainly great, "so many of them that they filled the streets and churches and walking was impossible" (ibid.). Fulcher, II, 9, 6; Lev, "Prisoners of War", p. 17. For a full discussion of the treatment of women see Friedman, Encounter Between Enemies, pp. 162-186, who notes at p. 169 that "the sexual abuse of female captives was more or less taken for

granted". Shaybani's Siyar, p. 86. 114 Shaybani's Siyar, p. 98. 115 113

116

Fulcher I: XXIII; trans. Ryan, p. 106. Albert of Aachen, Chronicon Hierosolymitanum, vol. VII, 40; Friedman, "Did Laws of War

Exist?", pp. 96-7.

Rules of War or War without Rules?

135

Nevertheless, a major difference between Muslim-Christian warfare in Outremer and that of warfare in early medieval Europe or that among the Celtic peoples was that

co-existed with slavery to far greater extent.117 Those of high rank were naturally more readily ransomed than those less able to pay, but the practice was widespread, and the ransoming of leaders might also involve the exchange of prisoners. In 1179, for example, Baldwin of Ibelin agreed to release 1,000 prisoners as part of his ransom agreement with Saladin, while the initial negotiations over the ransom of the Acre garrison in 1191 involved the release of a large number of both noble and nonnoble Frankish captives.118 The practice of redeeming captives, particularly the poor, from the enemy as an act of piety became established on both sides. The Syrian emir Usama records, for example, how in 1140, he was able to buy back some captured Muslim pilgrims on his own account, and others for his friend Mu'in ad-Din an act believed to win great merit in the eyes of God."9 An inscription at Busra, Syria, dating to 1148 records how revenues from certain parts of a village, and from ovens or mills were specifically designated for the redemption of poor Muslims, 'those who are without family and cannot free themselves'.120 Though not always applied, clemency towards non-combatants, could be seen as the mark both of nobility and religious virtue. Saladin's biographer Beha-ad-Din, for example, approvingly cites a number of anecdotes concerning the sultan's merciful treatment of Frankish women, the old and pilgrims as a mark of his piety.121 Strikingly, both Muslim and Frankish sources reveal a mutual sense of respect for the military prowess of the enemy, a feeling conspicuously absent in warfare between the Anglo-Normans and the Celts. The anonymous author of the Gesta Francorum was impressed by the valour of the Turks and recorded their supposed belief that they were of common stock with the Franks.122 Equally, Saladin's qadi and confidante Beha adDin could note of the Frankish defenders of Jaffa in 1192, 'My God, what fighting men they are! How strong they are and how great their courage! Despite everything, they had not closed any gate of the town and they continued to fight outside the gates...The ransom

-

117

of ransom in the Levant before the crusades see Friedman, Encounter Between context Yvonne Friedman, "The Ransoming of Captives in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem", in Autour de la premiere croisade. Actes du Colloque de la SSCLE (Clermont-Ferrand, 22-25juin 1995), ed. Michel Balard (Paris, 1996), pp. 177-89, and cf. La Liberazione dei 'captivi' tra Christianità e Islam, ed. Guilio Cipollone (Vatican City, 2000); Lev, "Prisoners of War", pp. 11-27. 118 Lev, "Prisoners of War", p. 14. For the varying accounts concerning the numbers of captives demanded, see Ambroise, The Crusade of Richard Lion-Heart, trans. Merton J. Hubert and John La Monte (New York, 1941), p. 217, n.36. 119 Memoirs of an Arab-Syrian Gentleman or an Arab Knight in the Crusades. The Memoirs of Usarnah Ibn-Munqidh, trans. Philip K. Hitti (Beirut, 1964), p. 111. 120 Hillenbrand, The Crusades. Islamic Perspectives, p. 551. 121 Beha ad-Din, 36-7. 122 Gesta Francorum et aliorum Hierosolimitanum, ed. Rosalind Hill (London, 1982), p. 21. For the

operation

Enemies, pp. 33-47, and for the wider

Matthew Strickland

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endurance and steadfastness of the enemy and the soundness of their operations seen by our men greatly impressed them'.123 There was much in common in the lifestyles and mentalité between Frankish and Muslim warrior elites, as revealed by the memoirs of the Syrian emir Usamah ibn Munquidh, or by the close friendship that developed between Saladin's brother, Al-Adil, and Richard I, who even knighted his son in 1192. Yet while such respect must have strengthened the operation of conventions of ransom, it did not always prevent the execution even of noble prisoners by both sides, though Muslims were required to spare any of those who accepted Islam.124 Following his victory at Hattin in 1187, Saladin had executed Reynauld of Chatillon as a personal enemy while he ordered all the captured Hospitallers and Templars to be beheaded. This was done less because the military orders forbade the ransoming of their knights, making them financially worthless, but primarily as a deliberate attempt to extirpate those seen as the most zealous enemies of Islam. Sufis and men of religion were permitted to carry out these killings, a clear example of how a group who did not normally bear arms might be directly if temporarily involved in bloodshed for religious reasons. Nevertheless, the soldiers who had captured them had expected a ransom, and to obtain them the sultan had to offer 50 dinars for each Templar or Hospitaller.125 Equally, Frankish admiration for the bravery and skill of the Turkish defenders of Acre did not stop their massacre by Richard in 1191, though it is important to stress that they were put to death primarily because Saladin was believed to have reneged on the terms of their ransom.126 Yet although Saladin's near-automatic execution of Frankish prisoners in the subsequent campaigns of 1191-1192 can be seen as a reprisal for the fate of the Acre garrison, he had not scrupled to execute Frankish prisoners on much earlier occasions, such as when he ordered the killing of all prisoners, including noncombatants, captured near Hama in 1178-9, and, as later at Hattin, these too were executed by Muslim religious. 127 It has been suggested that whereas in times of military success, Saladin could display the magnanimity for which he became famous, he was equally prone to put to death captives as a response to military failure.128 Nor was Saladin alone in such ambivalence. Tughtakin, the ruler of Damascus, who in the first decade of the twelfth century executed a number of high ranking Frankish captives, yet ransomed or enslaved others, though why such choices were made is often unclear.129 In some cases, the desire for vengeance overrode financial gain. In 11231124, the Fatimid vizier Ma'mun al-Bata'ihi had a large number of Christian prisoners taken in a naval raid executed in Cairo, despite their offering a ransom of 30,000 dinars, Beha ad-Din, 219.

Shaybani's Siyar,

101.

Gabrieli, Arab Historians of the Crusades, pp. 138-139 (Imad al-Din), pp. 124-5 (Ibn Al-Athir). On this execution see John Gillingham, Richard I

(Yale, 1999), pp.

166-171.

Lev, "Prisoners of War", p. 13. Lev, "Prisoners of War", pp. 12-14. Hillenbrand, Islamic Pespectives, pp. 552- 553; Lev, "Prisoners of War", p. 12.

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explaining his action as revenge for 500 Muslims killed earlier by the Franks.130 Some chroniclers regarded the fate of the Acre garrison in 1191 as a reprisal for Saladin's executions following Hattin, while at least one Egyptian chronicler, Abu 1-Mahasin, believed that the slaughter of the Franks on the fall of Acre in 1291 was in vengeance for the execution of the Muslim garrison a century earlier.131 The choice between death, ransom or captivity seems to have depended less on preconceived mores than circumstances and the volition of individual commanders.132

Conclusion The role of religion in the treatment afforded non-combatants was profoundly polarized. On the one hand, the earliest attempts to define non-combatants and the extent of their immunity stemmed from religious precepts, which might (as in the case of Islam but far more ambiguously in that of Christianity) directly address the position of non-combatants of a differing religion. Inherent in such precepts was the concept that clemency towards women and children was a moral and religious duty, though as the pronouncements of Deuteronomy and the Siyar show, such clemency might merely involve the substitution of killing by enslavement. In both Christian and Muslim societies, the ransoming of captives from the infidel was seen as a religious duty particularly deserving of divine merit. On the other, religious fervour in war against the infidel might justify acts of extreme ruthlessness; it is impossible, for instance, to find any equivalent in warfare among Anglo-Norman or Capetian warriors during the eleventh and twelfth centuries of Saladin's execution of the Templars and Hospitallers after Hattin in 1187, or of Richard I's execution of the garrison of Acre in 1191. Yet acts of mass killing of captives could equally occur in intra-Islamic warfare,133 while even a brief survey of conduct in Muslim-Frankish warfare in the Levant suggests that the treatment of non-combatants or combatants alike might differ widely depending on a variety of circumstances in which religious considerations were not always dominant. Crucially, however, while the enslavement of prisoners had been long established in warfare between Islamic states and against their neighbours such as Byzantium, the practice of selling fellow Christian captives into slavery had been largely eliminated within Western Europe by the time of the First Crusade. It was the continuance of such a practice by the Welsh, Scots and Irish, coupled with the indiscriminate killing of noncombatants which fuelled Anglo-Norman accusations of barbarity. In marked contrast, however, the status of Muslims as pagans allowed the Franks in the Levant to enslave Lev, "Prisoners of War", p. 15. Gabrieli, Arab Historians of the Crusades, p. 349. 132 Hillenbrand, Islamic Perspectives, pp. 549-556. 133 Lev, "Prisoners of War", pp. 15-16. 131

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captives of war if they so chose, and they can be seen engaging in this practice even in the course of the First Crusade itself. Thus rather than seeing the Franks as assimilating more developed customs of war from their interaction with Muslim states, a different patter emerges; the warriors of the First Crusade had left a Europe in which the enslaving of prisoners of war was proscribed, and the deliberate killing of the unarmed was seen as a mark of barbarity to be shunned by the chivalrous elite. The ravaging of an opponents lands was not in itself seen as unchivalric; the Anglo-Norman poet and courtier Jordan Fantosme saw nothing incongruous in having Philip of Flanders advise the wasting of Henry IPs lands in 1173, while William the Marshal's advice to Henry II to do likewise to Philip IPs territory in 1188 was regarded as 'moult cartels'. Nevertheless, despite invariable violations, the recognition of non-combatant immunity as developed by the Peace and Truce of God was sufficient, together with the absence of enslaving, to mark a major change in attitude towards the legitimacy of inermes as targets in war. Whereas in early medieval warfare non-combatants were invariably massacred or enslaved, chroniclers in the eleventh and twelfth centuries frequently indicate that if labourers or other noncombatants were attacked by milites or mercenaries such as the routiers, it was primarily in order to extract money from them in the form of ransoms or tenserie.135 In this context, it is significant that when Honoré Bouvet came to discuss the immunity of non-combatants, his questions always refer to the legitimacy of taking these social groups for ransom, and never to their killing. And when in his famous memorandum of 1435 on the methods to attain an English military recovery in northern France the English commander Sir John Fastolf explicitly advocated a policy of systematic destruction by 'werre cruelle and sharpe, without sparing of any parsone', he felt obliged to justify such conduct at some length from the charge of cruelty and

tyranny.136

Nevertheless, the boundaries of such restraint were culturally as much as religiously defined. If the Franks in Outremer did not scruple to enslave Muslim prisoners of war, the Anglo-Normans penetrating the peripheries of Britain frequently regarded their Celtic opponents as beyond the limits of chivalric conventions. In Muslim-Frankish war, ethnic differences tended to blur with those of religion; whether 'Saracen' or 'Frank', the enemy was an infidel, an idolater and, thus ipso facto a barbarian (whatever the cultural realities). As such, perceptions of ethnicity per se appear to have had less Jordan Fantosme's Chronicle, ed. Ronald C. Johnston (Oxford, 1981), 11. 439-450; L'Histoire de Guillaume le Maréchal, ed. Paul Meyer, 3 vols (Paris, 1891-1901), 11. 7,782-7,852; and John Gillingham, "War and Chivalry in the History of William the Marshal", in Thirteenth Century England, II, eds. Peter Coss and Simon Lloyd (Woodbridge, 1988), pp. 1-13, and repr. in John Gillingham, Richard Coeur de Lion. Kingship, Chivalry and War in the Twelfth Century (London, 1994), pp. 227-241. Strickland, War and Chivalry, pp. 310-312. Allmand, "War and the Non-combatant", p. 264.

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of War or War without Rules?

impact on the treatment of non-combatants in this theatre of war than in Anglo-Celtic warfare, where the status of the Celts as co-religionists and thus mutual adherents to ecclesiastically sponsored notions of restrain was almost completely overshadowed by Anglo-Normans' perception of them as barbarous savages. In the Baltic, religious antipathy by the crusaders towards their pagan Slav opponents fused with a similar contemptuous view of them as barbarians. This, together with the nature of such warfare, goes far to explain the propensity to kill non-combatants or slay prisoners with little or no compunction. In this context, parity in military technology was arguably one of the most crucial factors in the development and application of customs of war in trans-cultural hostilities. In Frankish-Muslim warfare, tactics and methods of combat might differ to a degree, but war was waged by engagement in the open field (as opposed to guerrilla warfare) and above all by the besieging of cities, castles and fortified places. Given the relative superiority of such defences against methods of attack, negotiated surrenders played a vital role in such siege warfare; developed by both cultures in intercultural warfare before the crusades, such customs were readily applied in conflicts between Franks and Muslims in the Levant. While the taking of cities by storm might lead to widespread killing of non-combatants, negotiated surrender played a very significant role in protecting the lives of civilians, particularly when combined with the developed application of ransom. By contrast, the absence or comparatively slow adoption of such fortifications, for example in Wales or Ireland, exposed non-combatants to more arbitrary conduct by enemies, and may well have led to them being targeted by invading armies who were often unable to bring their opponents, fighting an elusive guerrilla warfare, to a major engagement. Had William of Tyre known more about the conduct of war on the peripheries of northern Europe, or had lived to read Gerald of Wales' works such as the Expugnatio Hibernica, he might have had good reason to revise his views about the peculiar bitterness of inter-faith wars. Moreover, his observation that 'resentment and sacrilege and scorn of laws always acts as an incentive to bitter hate and enmity' could apply all too readily to the Albigensian crusades, which, as Malcolm Barber has recently shown, were marked by the particularly brutal treatment shown to non-combatants, making these emphatically not 'wars like any other'.137 Indeed, the most unrelenting treatment of non-combatants in war are arguably to be found not in warfare against the infidel, but against those deemed heretics or schismatics. Those erring Christians perceived as 'worse than Saracens' could scarcely expect the restraint which might be afforded even to Muslim enemies. In regard to conduct against the infidel, however, Archbishop William would perhaps have agreed the remark of the celebrated Dominican, James de -

-

Malcolm Barber, "The Albigensian Crusades. Wars like Any Other?", in Gesta Dei per Francos. Crusade Studies in Honour of Jean Richard, eds. Michel Balard, Benjamin Z. Kedar, and Jonathan Riley-Smith (Aldershot, 2001), pp. 45-56.

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in the Golden Legend (c. 1260), 'What would barbarians, if we are conquered by cruelty?'138

Voragine

we

gain from overcoming the

Jacobus de Voragine, Legenda aurea, ed. T. Graesse (repr. Osnabrück, 1965), p. 70, and cited in Norman Housely, Religious Warfare in Europe, 1400-1536 (Oxford, 2002), p. 150.

Martin van Creveld

A Tale of Two Wars

To what extent can the dichotomy intercultural war/trans-cultural war explain the different treatment meted out to prisoners of war at various times and places? To answer this question within the limits of the time available, I shall focus on two case studies. The first of these, drawn from the American Civil War, comes as close to being an intercultural war as possible, the two sides belonging to the same race, speaking the same language, and, until the outbreak of war, having been united within a single political entity. The second, drawn from the period when the followers of the Mahdi were facing the British in the Sudan, is as pure an example of trans-cultural war as can be found. What makes these two case-studies particularly suitable for our purpose is that they were separated by no more than twenty years; there was no question here of a change, say, from "the ancient world" into "the middle ages" or from "the middle ages" into "the modem age". Even so, we shall find that the above-mentioned dichotomy can only explain a small part of what actually took place. If some people find this conclusion disappointing, then so be it.

begin, then, with the fate of prisoners of war during the American Civil War.1 In fact, the name itself is a misnomer; a compromise between Northerners, who regarded it as the result of a Southern "rebellion", and Southerners, who to this day often call it "The War of Northern Aggression". These distinctions are important because, had they been followed and the logical consequences from then drawn, the outcome for prisoners of war on both sides would have been dire indeed. Southern prisoners in Northern hands would have faced the treatment normally reserved for rebels. Northern prisoners in Southern hands might have been regarded not as legitimate soldiers but as criminals on an illegitimate crusade. Either way, they would have been punished. This, as already To

My main source for this part of the article War Psychology (Columbus, Ohio, 1930).

is William

Hesseltine, Civil

War Prisons: A

Study of

Martin

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van

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mentioned, in spite of the fact that they were clearly members of the same culture and, in fact, as closely related as any two belligerents can be. In the event, both sides decided to ignore the fact that this was a Civil War. Instead, in respect to prisoners of war as well as most other questions, they decided to behave as if this was a conflict between two sovereign belligerents with equal rights in international law. In the case of the North, this decision was formally made when it adopted the so-called Lieber Code (after Francis Lieber, the author, who was a German immigrant). In the case of the South it was apparently the outgrowth of many decisions on the treatment of prisoners that were made by the War Department on an ad hoc basis In both cases, what dictated their behavior was not so much cultural the fear of reprisals. At most, cultural homogeneity had the effect of homogeneity between the leaders on both sides on this as well as other communication facilitating as

time went

on. as

matters.

The first prisoners taken were Federal troops who, at the outbreak of hostilities, found themselves stationed in western Texas on Confederate soil. Following negotiations, officers and, unusually for the time, common soldiers were put on parole; in other words, they were permitted to go home on after promising that they would take no further part in the war. The Union, though, did not have Confederate troops on its soil and hence did not reciprocate. As a result, soon enough both sides found themselves treating their prisoners according to the prevailing law of war, more or less. On both sides prisoners of war were interned, often in disused factory buildings or warehouses that had been acquired by the Government and modified for the purpose. On both sides, they were kept strictly separate from other categories of persons who had their liberty taken away from them, such as felons. Both sides also separated officers from other ranks. Officially because it would not do to house them together; unofficially perhaps in order to prevent communication among them. Though arrangements were often far from satisfactory, both also recognized it as their duty to provide prisoners with minimal food, clothing, and medical care at their own (i.e. the Government's, not the prisoners) expense. Deliberate maltreatment was fairly rare. Where it existed, it was usually due to a shortage of resources, particularly on the part of the Confederacy, rather than ill will; perhaps this helps explain why, among the Southerners who were put on trial on this charge after the War, all but one were acquitted. Though guards were sometimes trigger happy, shooting prisoners who appeared as if they were trying to escape, neither side either shackled prisoners or required them to work. Prisoners did, however, often occupy themselves. Either they volunteered for work gangs, in which case they could make a little money. Alternatively they manufactured various trinkets which they would then sell to guards or to visitors. From time to time, the rules were broken or threatened to be broken. Early in the War President Lincoln had some Southern sailors who were captured while carrying letters of marque in other words, engaging in warlike activities even though they were -

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not members of the Confederate Navy tried, convicted, and sentenced to death. As the South threatened to retaliate in kind he was forced to relent, however, and from then on -

there

question of punishing captured soldiers except in case they turned out to be spies. Owing to its smaller resources, the South experienced greater difficulty in looking after the prisoners it had taken and from time to time accepted gifts of food, clothing, tents, and medical supplies earmarked for them. For the same reason, it was more interested in exchanging prisoners than the North was. Perhaps because the fronts were so enormous and widely dispersed, however, most negotiations involved only particular fronts and commanders. There was never any attempt at a general settlement, and most prisoners stayed where they were till the war's end. The same factor that motivated the South to negotiate the release of prisoners, i.e. a shortage of resources, also meant that its commanders sometimes continued to put prisoners on parole. At one point there was some disagreement as to just what parole was no more

meant. A Northern

be

General, Halleck, insisted that troops released in this way could still non-combat duties; however, when the Confederacy threatened to

employed on re-captured

Union soldiers who had been so employed, he and other Union commanders backed down. Union forces that found themselves in enemy territory routinely violated the laws of war by first emancipating black males and then enlisting them. Confederate forces that took such black soldiers prisoner sometimes retaliated by executing them out of hand. Since there were no black units in the Confederate Army fear of retaliation did not exist. In this way racial considerations played a role in the treatment prisoners received, adding yet another dimension to the conflict. To sum up, the most important fact governing the fate of prisoners of war was that they were not considered criminals. Not being considered criminals, they were not put on trial and kept separate from other categories of detained people. They also had the right to be maintained at the expense of their captors, something which even in the West, was by no means self-evident before the middle of the eighteenth century. They were not pressed to join the other side or to render services to him. They were not expected to work, but they were often allowed to make a little money on the side. The most important factor that determined the treatment meted out to them was not so much cultural homogeneity as the fear of reprisals against one's own people who were similarly held captive. This in turn led to a process of negotiation that went on throughout the war, and which was no doubt facilitated by the fact that the leaders on both sides belonged to the same culture and had, indeed, often studied at the same schools and served in the same institution. execute

To move, now, to our second case study, the person whose fate I want to follow in some detail was named Charles Neufeld.2 A Prussian citizen, he had come to Egypt in 2

Cf. Charles

1899).

Neufeld, A Prisoner of the Khaleefa: Twelve

Years

'

Captivity at Omdurman (London,

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van

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pursuit of his business interests. In March 1887, he and a number of companions naive guards, clerks, and a black female servant went out in an expedition to the Western Sudan where he hoped to purchase a quantity of gum for re-sale in Egypt. At -

-

the time, most of the Sudan was under the mle of the Khalif who had succeeded the Mahdi and whose men had just killed General Gordon in Khartoum. The tribe with whom Neufeld was planning to trade was, however, friendly to the British and the British commander in Egypt, General Stephenson, even gave Neufeld some letters to deliver to their chief. In the event, the plan misfired. Neufeld's guides, though they were members of the tribe in question, betrayed him, leading him on a desert trail far to the east of the one he had planned to take. By the time he realized his error it was to late and he and his party were ambushed and captured. Taken to face his captors' commanders, or Emirs, Neufeld's greatest problem was just the opposite of the one facing American captives in the Civil War. On pain of being treated as criminals and executed, their concern was to show that they were indeed soldiers serving a Government. His, to the contrary, was to explain away the letters from Stephenson he was carrying and which were found in his possession; again, the penalty was death. Thanks to the fact that there was nobody around who could read English he succeeded, more or less, but not to the extent that he should be set free and allowed to continue on his mission, as he demanded. Taken to Omdurman, Neufeld was thrown into prison. It consisted of a large, dark room with absolutely no furniture or sanitary arrangements of any kind. Predictably, he calls it The Black Hole of Calcutta; to the natives it was known as Umm Hagar, the Stone Mother. In this place, which at times was so crowded as to offer standing room only and where prisoners, lacking bedding, were always fighting for a place near the wall to lean on, he was to spend much of the next twelve years. The one redeeming feature was that daytime could usually be spent out of doors in a courtyard that enclosed the prison compound. Later Neufeld was even permitted to build a hovel for himself and spend most of the nights there. He could, however, never know when, for this or that reason, he would be thrown back into the Umm Hagar itself. Unlike the American prisoners of war, Neufeld was not separated from other kinds of detainees. A few of them were Egyptian prisoners of war dating to the Gordon Expedition. Most, however, were ordinary criminals or else had offended the Khalif in one way or another as, for instance, by marrying a well-known beauty whom he himself coveted; nearby there was even a woman's prison which, however, Neufeld does not describe. Unlike the American prisoners, he was kept in shackles throughout the period in question (the weight of the irons, though, was sometimes varied in accordance as to whether he had found favor in the eyes of the gaolers or not). Unlike the American Union or Confederate Governments the Khalif, though well aware of the existence of his prisoner, did not see it as his duty to feed him or any of the others. Those who could not look after themselves were simply left to starve; before being thrown into the Nile, their leg-irons would be taken off and fitted to new arrivals. Neufeld had to fend for

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the other prisoners did. Occasionally he was able to make a little money by illuminating books or acting as a doctor. Some help came from a German Protestant minister by the name of Ohrwalder who was living in Khartoum at the time. More came from his female servant, Hasseena. At one point she was about to be forcibly married to a local admirer but extricated herself by claiming that she knew secret ways of poisoning any man who would sleep with her. Next, having been married to Neufeld, she carried his letters to Ohrwalder who forwarded them to Cairo where Neufeld's friends and associates succeeded in interesting a newspaper in his adventures and raise some money for him. It was sent to Ohrwalder, who bought provisions and had Hasseena deliver them. She in tum permitted the guards to deprive her from some of them as a sort of condition for being allowed to pass on the rest. Being a woman she was not searched upon entry and exit; as a result she was also able to smuggle the occasional letter to and from him. From time to time there were variations on this routine. The Dervishes had vague plans for invading Egypt and on several occasions Neufeld was interrogated on the British military presence there. Of course he did what he could to exaggerate the extent of their power; giving descriptions of the fortifications of Cairo that made that city appear impregnable. At one time he was taken out of prison and taken to Khartoum. There, still in chains, he was required to use his knowledge of chemistry he had spent to organize the manufacture of saltpeter for the Khalif. some years studying medicine This represented a clear violation of the laws of war as then understood in the "civilized" world. Later, he apologized for his actions by claiming that what saltpeter he produced was useless and that the Dervishes had enough of it in any case; indeed one gets the impression that, if only to survive, Neufeld to some extent "went native". From time to time, he was able to communicate with friends in Cairo. Using local intermediaries, the latter hatched several escape plans for him. The authorities, however, were vigilant. One of their countermeasures was to make Neufeld marry a local woman by the name of Umm es Shole. She was a widow, the daughter of a Greek family, and had been brought up in Ethiopia. When he was sent back to Omdurman she went with him. Visiting him in prison, she took the place of Hasseena. The latter had given birth to an illegitimate child, which caused Neufeld to divorce her. She was last heard of in a whorehouse leading the kind of life that, he says, she liked. Neufeld's various schemes for effecting an escape failed before they even got under way. The most important reason for this was because coordinating a party of camels that would carry him across the desert was too difficult. Without such a party a man on foot had no chance of eluding pursuit; long before arriving at the nearest oasis, indeed, he would die of thirst. As a result, he remained at Omdurman. Most of the time he was kept in prison, though towards the end of his ordeal he lived in a house that had been found for him as he became part of the Khalif s attempts to set up a factory for manufacturing powder. He was finally freed after Herbert Kitchener had defeated the Khalif at the Battle of Omdurman in September 1898. Not long before the battle he himself just

as

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-

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overheard his captors boasting how they would blind their captives and bait them. Those who wish to will see in this proof of the extraordinary cruelty of trans-cultural war. It may, however, equally well have been due to the fact that the Dervishes did not have the organization to intern large numbers of prisoners for any length of time; a problem, as we saw, that was almost equally troublesome for the Confederacy. After his release he promptly wrote his memoirs, gently chastising Kitchener for giving the Dervishes what he himself had received at their hands, i.e. quarter. Though there was some talk of "iron devils" the name the Dervishes gave to the railway that carried the supplies of Kitchener's armies there can be no question of Neufeld and his captors misunderstanding each other owing to their different origins. On the contrary, after a short period of adjustment they understood each other only too well. Having decided to let Neufeld live, the Khalif and his men were determined to prevent his escape, and later they also tried to make use of what they supposed to be his skills. Neufeld was equally determined to survive and, if he could, get away. Both sides used what assets they had to bargain with each other, they offering better conditions and he, his knowledge of medicine and chemistry; neither, however, succeeded in gaining any great advantage for himself. The situation might, indeed, have continued indefinitely had not the arrival of Kitchener put an end to the saga. -

-

As anyone who has followed the story so far can see, Neufeld's experience as a prisoner of war was as different from that of American Civil-War era as different can be. The difference, however, cannot be attributed simply to the fact that the one was part of a trans-cultural stmggle whereas the other took place within a single civilization. In the case of the American Civil War, the most important factor that determined the behavior of captors was the desire to avoid reprisals. Both sides avidly read each other's proclamations on the subject as well as following each other's papers. Largescale mistreatment of prisoners was impossible to conceal for long. As a result, they engaged in much tacit and explicit bargaining; seeking to achieve an advantage as when the South put Northerners on parole and reaffirm their positions. By contrast, the Khalif did to Neufeld much as he did to any other prisoners whom, for some reason, he did not wish to kill immediately. He was kept in chains, was flogged for misbehavior, and compelled to look after his own needs, economically speaking. Whatever good treatment American prisoners received was above all a product of reciprocity; whatever hardship Neufeld suffered, the outcome of factors that had little to do with the fact that he was a European and a Christian. If anything he was better treated than many his Moslem fellow prisoners were. Of the latter, some had a leg amputated above the ankle in order to prevent them from escaping. Others were burdened by various instruments of torture, and others still were deliberately flogged or starved to death. Rather than confirming that trans-cultural war is waged with less restraint than intra-cultural war, our two case studies show that each belligerent was to a very large extent the prisoner of his own ways of thinking. A striking confirmation, if -

-

A Tale of Two Wars

needed, of John culture as of politics.3 one were

3

John Keegan, A

147

Keegan's claim that warfare is

History of Warfare (London, 1994).

as

much the continuation of

IV. Sexual Violence in Wars

Corinne Saunders

Sexual Violence in Wars The Middle Ages

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The topic of women and war is a multi-faceted one. There are, of course, many ways in which women may experience war: as victims, as fighters, as prisoners, as workers, as healers, and as those left to watch and wait.1 It has been rare until very recently for women to join in battle, though history and legend offer some celebrated examples: the Amazons, the Valkyries, Joan of Arc. The role of women as supporting those who fight, whether by sustaining the everyday structures of a society whose active males are absent, or by tending the wounded, has, however, been crucial across the ages. Yet the association of women with war is perhaps most likely to evoke the fraught topic of sexual violence. There is a particular link between rape and warfare, and the atrocities of war include the sexual violation of the body. Rape tends to represent one aspect of ravaging perhaps because women are viewed as one element of the property that ravaging armies seize. As members of an enemy society, they are viewed not as individuals but as objects, to be possessed as a mark of victory, and to be shamed as a penalty of defeat. The boundaries of war are often marked on the woman's body. It may be argued too that sexual aggression is an intrinsic aspect of the necessary aggression of warfare, that killing and desire fuel each other. In addition, war creates a situation in which the customary regulation of violence is lifted, so that violence in sexual relations may become the norm though the situation is complicated, for war may also shape rules of chivalric behaviour and require the protection of the innocent, in particular women and children. -

-

published a related essay, "Women and Warfare in Medieval English Writing", in Writing War: Medieval Literary Responses to Warfare, eds. Corinne Saunders, Françoise Le Saux and Neil Thomas (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 187-212.1 am grateful to my fellow editors and to the publisher for allowing me to use much of the same material here. Contemporary studies of the subject of women and war include Jean Bethke Elshtain, Women and War (New York, 1987); Eva Isaksson, ed., Women and the Military System (New York, 1988); Sharon Macdonald, Pat Holden and Shirley Ardener, eds., Images of Women in Peace and War: Cross-Cultural and Historical Perspectives, Women in Society Series (Basingstoke, 1987); and Jeanne Vickers, Women and War (London and Atlantic Highlands, 1993). I have

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It is too simple to argue that rape is simply a predictable aspect of warfare, for in many of the most celebrated instances in western literature, rape and its counterpart, abduction, trigger as well as reflect deep social disorder and inspire acts of revenge that reverberate in profound and enduring ways. The two great classical examples of the violation of the woman's body as the cause of war, those of Lucretia and Helen of Troy, both result in war.2 The rape of Lucretia and her subsequent suicide, which so clearly marks the understanding of rape as irrevocable pollution of the body, causes the people of Rome to rise up, and leads to the overthrow of the Tarquins and the eventual founding of the Republic. The story, told by both Livy and Ovid, the former

emphasising political upheaval, the latter personal tragedy, inspired numerous medieval and Renaissance retellings, including Shakespeare's narrative poem The Rape of Lucrèce. It was the subject too of recurrent theological debate, triggered by Augustine in The City of God, in which he argued that rape should not necessitate suicide. Of equal though different power was the legendary story of the Trojan queen Helen, whose abduction by Paris leads to the Greek war against the Trojans and the fall of the great civilisation of Troy. Like the story of Lucretia, that of Helen was told and retold by medieval writers, and was the catalyst too for the narrative of Troilus and Cressida, immortalised by Chaucer and Shakespeare. These examples are balanced by a series of Biblical instances, in which sexual violation is again connected with social upheaval. The rape of Dinah, the daughter of Jacob, by Shechem is avenged by her brothers in a dreadful massacre of the city of Shechem and his father Hamor. David's taking of Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah the Hittite, is the cause of Uriah's death, betrayed in battle at David's command, but also of enduring disorder within the house of David: "Now therefore the sword shall never depart from thine house" (II Samuel 12: 10). The motif of violation and familial disintegration continues in the rape of David's daughter Tamar (II Samuel 13) by her brother Amnon: Absalom kills Amnon in revenge, is exiled and ultimately killed by Joab and his servants. Shakespeare would bring together many of the emphases of these legends in Titus Andronicus, where the rape and mutilation of Lavinia marks the terrible vengeance taken on Titus by the sons of Tamora, the defeated queen of the Goths, and inspires Titus's own vengeance on Tamora and her sons: the tragic dénouement of the play is marked by the death of all but Titus's son Lucius, who is left "To heal Rome's harms and wipe away her woe" (V, iii, 147). This play depicts in horrific detail the woman's body as a site of battle, violated and mutilated in revenge, seized and defiled as property, and ultimately the cause of a further cycle of violence and death. Like the story of Lucretia, that of Lavinia depends on the understanding of rape as absolute taint and pollution. Lavinia's rape can be avenged but she cannot be purified: the violation is irremediable, and her silencing in life can only be answered by her silencing in death ("Die, die, Lavinia, and thy shame with thee", V, iii, 45). In the 2

For detailed discussion of these examples, the debate over them, and their medieval retellings, see Corinne Saunders, Rape and Ravishment in the Literature ofMedieval England (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 152-86.

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medieval period and into the Renaissance, such examples were enormously influential, and the nexus of rape, abduction and the social upheaval of war thus plays a prominent role in the dramatisation of violence within medieval literature. The drama of women and war is enhanced in medieval writing by the notion of gender as defined by opposition and contrast. Indeed, it might be said that the medieval thought world more generally is structured through binary oppositions, most of all those between this temporal world and the eternal world: between earthly mutability and imperfection and the unchanging perfection of heaven. The oppositions of good and evil, of self and other too are crucial, and it is perhaps unsurprising that gender definitions, following medical theories and theological doctrines of the time, are also structured on oppositions. Women, created originally from Adam's rib, were associated with the body; men, created when God breathed His spirit into the dust of the ground, were associated with the spirit. Thus women were seen as more physical, weaker, more governed by their emotions and their bodily nature, in particular their function as mothers, whereas men were seen as more rational, stronger, governed by the spirit and the intellect. Each had their own spheres: women belonged to the private, domestic world, set safely within the walls of house or castle; men belonged to the world outside, made up of the public spheres of government, law, trade, and warfare. For medieval writers, the opposition between genders and the collision between worlds offered special sources of narrative interest and tension. Nowhere could this be more dramatically exploited than in narratives placing women within a situation of warfare, the most extreme and violent manifestation of the male sphere. In their treatment of women and warfare, medieval chronicles tend to exploit the contrast between types, masculine and feminine, and between action and passivity, the bearing of arms and the desire for peace. Most of all, for the chroniclers behaviour towards women can become a key to moral definition, distinguishing good from evil. For Froissait, the shameful treatment of women is a powerful emblem of enemy dishonour and immorality, by contrast to English chivalry.3 The Bretons, for example, mistreat the people of Castile, "we coude nat haue ben worse dalte withall than we were, as in ravysshinge of our wyves and doughters. ." (1385).4 In the battle of the .

3

For comprehensive studies of war and chivalry in the medieval period, see Matthew Strickland, War and Chivalry: The Conduct and Perception of War in England and Normandy, 1966-1217 (Cambridge, 1996) and Malcolm Vale, War and Chivalry: Warfare and Aristocratic Culture in England, France and Burgundy at the End of the Middle Ages (London, 1981). See also Andrew Ayton, Knights and Warhorses: Military Service and the English Aristocracy under Edward III

(Woodbridge, 1994).

Sir John Froissart, The Chronicles of Froissart, trans. John Bourchier and Lord Bemers, intro. William Paton Ker, The Tudor Translations 27-33, 6 vols. (London, 1901-1903), vol. 4, xxxi, p. 174. I employ this translation for its relative contemporaneity with the other English literary works discussed here; all subsequent references to Froissart will be from this edition and cited by volume, chapter and page number. For a standard French edition, see Simeon Luce et al., eds., Les

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English against

the French at Caen (1346), the commander, Thomas, takes action to violation of women by the soldiers: "he. rode into the streates, and saved prevent many lyves of ladyes, damosels, and cloysterers fro defoyling, for the soudyers were without mercy" (I, cxxiiii, 284). The gentlemanly nature of the English army is epitomised by their refusal to violate women: Sir Godfray of Harecourt, a Norman fighting on the English side, commands the townspeople at the same siege of Caen not to kill citizens, "nor to vyolate any woman" (I, cxxiiii, 285), and in the sieges of Bergnes and Damne, ladies and children are sent away to avoid violation. Unlike the chivalrous English, the foreign captains left in France after the accord is reached (1360), "defoyled many a damoselles" (II, ccxv, 86). Froissart's description plays on the contrast between chivalrous and savage, but also suggests that, like pillage, rape of women in conquered territories was a common means of asserting military dominance outside battle.5 In chronicles of the Crusades, the violation of women in warfare can repeatedly function to define the Saracens as evil, and can also indicate infidelity and corruption among the Crusading armies. Roger of Wendover, for example, in his entry for 1096, describes how the Teutonic Cmsading army abuses its privileges while marching into Hungary by drinking, killing, plundering and "cum uxoribus Hungarorum et filiabus rem illicitam violenter perpétrantes" (II, 71), "abusing the wives and daughters of the Hungarians" (I, 385). But, as in Froissart's description, little emphasis is placed on the victims: rather, the action of sexual abuse characterises the male armies as corrupt. One of the most notable literary depictions in early English writing of women violated in warfare, that found in Archbishop Wulfstan's Sermo Lupi ad Anglos (c.1014), employs similar thematic patterning. Wulfstan employs the ominous image of the Viking raids to represent God's punishment of the sinful English people. The third and longest version of the sermon (MSS E and I), which may draw on the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle entry for the year 1014, includes several long passages detailing contemporary breaches of law and societal order and describing the Viking attacks as punishment for these. Wulfstan graphically portrays how a sinful thane is punished through the loss of his property in a Viking raid, employing the image of sexual violation to portray devaluation. The Vikings rape the thane's wife and daughter as he looks on: .

5

.

Chroniques deJ. Froissart, 14 vols. (Paris, 1869-1967). For a full account of the war, see Jonathan Sumption, The Hundred Years War, 2 vols. (London, 1990-99). A further striking example, this time of the unchivalric behaviour of French raiders, is provided by Henry Knighton, who describes the violation of nine beautiful women from Winchelsea, 'in a manner too horrible to relate'. See Chronica de eventibus Angliae a tempore régis Edgari usque mortem regis Ricardi Secundi: Knighton's Chronicle 1337-1396, ed. Geoffrey H. Martin, Oxford Medieval Texts (Oxford, 1995).

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"And oft tyne oööe twelfe, aslc asfter obrum, scendaö to bysmore pxs {jegenes cwenan 7 hwilum his dohtor oööe nydmagan haar he onlocaö be lœt hine sylfne rancne 7 ricne 7 genoh godne asr baet gewurde".6 "And often ten or a dozen, one after another, insult disgracefully the thegn's wife, and sometimes his daughter or near kinswoman, whilst he looks on, who considered himself brave and mighty and stout enough before that happened".7

Wulfstan exhibits little or no pity for the women; they represent a part of the thane's property, and their rape brutally proves God's anger with him. That there was contemporary concern about such treatment of women, however, is suggested by the ninth-century penitential Capitula Judiciorum, which includes the pontifical ruling that women who are raped in warfare do not have to do penance for fornication.8 The thirteenth-century chronicle of Roger of Wendover, formerly ascribed to and retold by Matthew Paris (1204-31), looks back on the same period but in considerably more lurid terms.9 The focus is not punishment but the demonic evil of the invaders, graphically evinced in images of the violation of women. The chronicle describes the Danish King Sweyn's vengeance on the English, which includes murder, burning, pillage, destruction of churches and widespread rape (1013). Violation becomes part of the stereotypical portrayal of the dehumanised enemy. The image of rape most dramatically conveys the evil of the enemy in the account of the defence of the Abbess Ebba of Collingham and her nuns against Viking invaders in 870. Ebba states directly that violation of women is one danger of heathen warfare: "Advenerunt nuper ad partes nostras pagani nequissimi et totius humanitatis ignari, qui loca regionis hujus singula perlustrantes, nec sexui muliebri nec parvulorum quidem parcunt aetati, ecclesias et personas ecclesiasticas destruunt, fœminas sanctimoniales prostituunt, et obvia sibi quaeque conterendo consumunt".10 ...

lately come into these parts most wicked pagans, destitute of all humanity, who through every place, sparing neither the female sex nor infantine age, destroying churches and ecclesiastics, ravishing holy women, and wasting and consuming every thing in "There have roam

their way".11

6

7

8

9

10

"

The Homilies of Wulfstan, ed. Dorothy Bethurum (Oxford, 1957), 'Sermo ad Anglos', XX, MSS El, p. 271,11. 113-17. Wulfstan, "The Sermon of the Wolf to the English", in English Historical Documents, 1: c. 5001042, ed. Dorothy Whitelock (London, 1955), pp. 857-58. See Capitula Judiciorum VIII, Synodus romana XXVIII, in Die Bussbücher und das Kanonische Bussverfahren, ed. Herrmann J. Schmitz, 2 vols. (Mainz, 1883 and Düsseldorf, 1898), vol. 2, p. 226.

Roger of Wendover's chronicle is itself a compilation: for discussion of his sources, see Antonia Gransden, Historical Writing in England, c. 550 c. 1307 (London, 1974), p. 359. Roger of Wendover, Chronica, sive Flores Historiarum, ed. Henry O. Coxe, English Historical Society, 5 vols. (London, 1841-44), vol. 1, p. 301. Roger of Wendover, Roger of Wendover's Flowers of History, trans. John A. Giles, 2 vols. (London, 1899), vol. l,p. 191. -

Corinne Saunders

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The desecration of churches is echoed in the rape of nuns. In cuts off her nose and lips and invites her nuns to follow suit:

a

dramatic response, Ebba

ilia admirandas animositatis abbatissa, palam cunctis sororibus exemplum castitatis prœbens, non solum sanctimonialibus illis proficuum, verumetiam omnibus et successuris virginibus aeternaliter amplectendum, arrepta novacula nasum proprium cum labro superiori ad dentes usque praacidens, horrendum de se spectaculum adstantibus praebuit universis. Quod factum memorabile cum congregatio tota videns admiraretur, simili de se opère a singulis perpetrato, materna sunt vestigia insecutœ".12 ".

.

.

heroic spirit, affording to all the holy sisters an example of chastity but to be embraced by all succeeding virgins for ever, took a razor, and with it cut off her nose, together with her upper lip up unto the teeth, presenting herself a horrible spectacle to those who stood by. Filled with admiration at this admirable deed, the whole assembly followed her maternal example, and severally did the like to

".

.

.

the abbess, with

an

profitable only to themselves,

themselves".13

Although the convent is burnt, the nuns succeed in protecting their virginity by, in a sense, ungendering themselves, cutting off the nose and lips that define the feminine countenance and destroying the capacity to incite desire. The depiction of the violation of women, then, provides a powerful means to portray and demonise the enemy in chronicles. The earliest English poetic texts also employ compellingly the image of women in warfare, both to define the enemy and more generally as an emblem of suffering. The poem Genesis A makes poignant use of the motif of the seizure of women in the depiction of the battle against the kings of Sodom and Gomorrah: "Sceolde forht monig blachleor ides bifiende gan on fremdes faeöm. feollon wergend bryda and beaga, bennum seoce".

"Many a frightened, white-cheeked woman had to go trembling into a stranger's embrace: the defenders of wives and rings fell, fatally wounded".14 The capture of the women functions as a haunting symbol of loss and defeat. Part of the poem's power lies in its realism: for the audience, capture and servitude must have been a genuine possibility, and indeed Anglo-Saxon marriage laws allow for the possibility of losing a wife through invasion.15 Beowulf similarly employs the image of the captive or helpless woman. The women in the poem are political pawns, frequently married into 12 13 14

15

Roger of Wendover, Chronica, sive Flores Hlstorlarum (see above, n. 10), vol. 1, pp. 301-2. Roger of Wendover, R. ofWendover's Flowers qfHistory, (see above, n. ll),vol. l,pp. 191-92. Genesis A: A New Edition, ed. Alger N. Doane (Madison, 1978), 11. 1969-72; Christine Fell, Cecily Clark and Elizabeth Williams, Women in Anglo-Saxon England: and the Impact of 1066 (Oxford, 1984), p. 67. For a discussion of Anglo-Saxon laws concerning rape and abduction, see Saunders, Rape and Ravishment (see above, n. 2), pp. 35-48.

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other tribes, and potentially the victims of hostilities between peoples. Thus Hildeburh watches helplessly as her brother and son kill each other when feud breaks out between Finn and her own kinsmen; Ffrothgar's daughter Freawaru awaits renewed battle between the Danes and the Heatho-Bards; the name of Ffrothgar's queen, Wealhtheow, itself means "foreign slave". Just as in Genesis A, lamentation is the only action available to the captured women, so the lines used to describe Hildeburh in Beowulf are emblematic of the woman's part in warfare, "ides gnornode, / geomrode giddum", "The In Beowulf we are left too with the powerful woman mourned, chanted a image of the Geatish woman who mourns Beowulf s death and the coming destruction of her tribe:

dirge".16

"Swylce giomorgyd Geatisc meowle brasd on bearhtme bundenheorde song sorgcearig swiöe geneahhe, I>ast hio hyre heofungdagas hearde ondrede, waslfylla worn, werudes egesan, hynöo ond hasftnyd". "Likewise, a Geatish woman, sorrowful, her hair bound up, sang a mournful lay,

chanted clamourously again and again that she sorely feared days of lamentation for herself, a multitude of slaughters, the terror of an army, humiliation and captivity".17

The lines clearly suggest the expectation of the captivity and violation of women as well as the death of the Geatish warriors. The image of the woman weeping in warfare recurs across Anglo-Saxon literature, just as it will in the writing of later periods. In later medieval literature, sexual violence continues to play a key role in depictions of warfare and battle, and again this is linked to the recurrent opposition between gender types and between the masculine and feminine, public and private worlds. The definitive incident in Arthurian history is perhaps that of Arthur's defeat of the giant of Mont Saint Michel, who has raped and murdered the Duchess of Brittany, and repeatedly violates other women: in his victory over the giant, Arthur establishes the order of chivalry in the savage world outside Logres. The episode is first recounted in the early twelfth century by Geoffrey of Monmouth and subsequently by Wace and Lazamon; a number of later romances, including the alliterative Morte Arthure and Malory's Morte Darthur, treat it in some detail. The giant rapes not one but two women, Helen, the daughter of Howel, Duke of Brittany, and her aged attendant. In Lazamon's Brut (c.1220), which translates Wace's Roman de Brut (1155), the attendant herself recounts the horrifying tale:

16

Beowulf

ed. and trans. Michael Swanton, Manchester Medieval Classics

1117-18. 17

Beowulf, ed. and trans. Michael Swanton, 11. 3150-55.

(Manchester, 1978),

11.

Corinne Saunders

158 "J>er be eotend une ifeng: ford mid him-seoluen. fiftene mile: into bisse wilde wude. hider to bissen ilke stude: bus he us diste: to dasi a seouen nihte. Sone swa he hider com: swa he hat maide inom. he wolde mon-radene: habben wiö ban maidene. /Eide nasfde heo na mare: buten fihtene 3ere. ne mihte hat maiden: his mone i-bolien. anan swa he lai hire mide: hire lif heo losede sone. I>a [h]e hafde his idon: swa me seoluen inom. a uolden he me laiden: and lai mid me seoluen. nu hafeö he mine ban alle: lad-liche a-brokene. mine leomen al to-leöed. mi lif me is a-laöed". 18 ...

"There the giant took us with him, fifteen miles into this wild wood, here to this same place; he did this to us seven nights ago. As soon as he came here, he took that maiden; he wished to have intercourse with her. She was not more than fifteen years old, nor could she suffer his force; as soon as he lay with her, she lost her life.. When he had done this, he took me thus; he put me on the ground, and lay with me himself. Now he has hideously broken all my bones; my limbs are all separated; my life is hateful to me". .

.

Soon the

scene

is re-enacted as the

giant returns with twelve swine:

"Adun he warp ha dede swin: & him-seolf saet her-bi. his fur he beten a-gon: & muchele treowen lœiden on. t>a six swin he to-droh: & euere he to ban wiue loh. & sone umbe while: he lai bi ban wife. ah he nuste noht ban tidende: hat comen to his wife-hinge".

(12964-68) "He threw down the dead swine, and sat down by them; he began to tend his fire, and he put a great deal of wood on it. He tore up the six swine, and he continually laughed at that woman; and soon, after a while, he lay by her; but he did not know what was to become of his mistress".

While Arthur's avenging of the raped women becomes part of the Arthurian history, a foundation stone in the development of the code of chivalry and service to women, ultimately the episode belongs to the tradition of history and chronicle and is atypical in romance narratives.19 Romance responds only to the shadow of such actions, and to the

19

La3amon, Brut, eds. George L. Brook and Roy F. Leslie, Early English Text Society, OS 250 and 277, 2 vols. (London, 1963 and 1978), vol. 2, MS Caligula, 11. 12927-41. All subsequent references to La3amon will be from this edition, volume 2, and cited by line number. The symbolic defeat of the giant by Arthur and the consequent condemnation of rape within 'la

norme courtoise' is discussed by Dietmar Rieger, "Le motif du viol dans la littérature de la France médiévale entre norme courtoise et réalité courtoise", Cahiers de civilisation médiévale 31 (1988), pp. 241-67: 247-48; see also Antoinette Saly, "La demoiselle 'esforciée' dans le roman arthurien", in Amour, mariage et transgressions au moyen âge: Université de Picardie, Centre d'Etudes Médiévales, Actes du Colloque des 24, 25, 26 et 27 mars 1983, eds. Danielle Buschinger and André Crepin, Göppinger Arbeiten zur Germanistik 420 (Göppingen, 1984), pp. 215-24. Saly points to the

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threat of enforced marriage. The rapes committed by the giant of Mont Saint Michel, so clearly drawn from legendary chronicle material, do not find analogies in Middle English romance. The figure of the giant, however, does appear repeatedly, and is consistently associated with unbridled lust. His monstrous figure becomes the stereotypical enemy the dark counterpart of the chivalric knight, who acts on the base physical desires regulated by the strictures of chivalry. Later romances are often structured around the idea of the contravention of chivalric order both within and beyond the Arthurian world, and they use in particular the motif of enforced marriage and the threat of sexual violation. The focal point of the romance Ipomadon, for instance, becomes the rescue of the lady le Fere from her attacker Sir Lyolyne, "a fendes fere [companion] / That wastythe here landes all way" (6482-83); his aim is to "her have / In to Ynde Mayore" (6504).20 Lyolyne, like the giant of Mont Saint Michel, is identified as a demonic figure, an outsider both for his nationality and his paganism, whose great might only Ipomadon dares confront. His blackness and villainy provide a foil for Ipomadon's excellence, and Lyolyne's force is contrasted with Ipomadon's love for and obedience to le Fere, his use of prowess for rather than against her. Romances play repeatedly on the lady's need for a defender and lord, if only to save her from other would-be defenders. The successful protection of a lady's castle from its attackers is frequently accompanied by the swift conferral of her hand and lands on her defender. This phenomenon is particularly evident in the early fourteenth-century Ywain and Gawain, an English rewriting of Chrétien de Troyes' romance Yvain. After the lady Alundyne's protector has been killed by Ywain, Lunete elaborates the vulnerability of her mistress: -

,

"If twa knyghtes be in the felde On twa stedes, with spere and shelde, And the tane the tother may sla: Whether es the better of tha?" Sho said, "He that has the bataile". "... The lady thoght than, al the nyght, How that sho had na knyght, Forto seke hir land thorghout, To kepe Arthur and hys rowt*"

[""company]

(999-1003; 1021-24)

prevalence of 'viol'

as 'un motif chevaleresque' (218) and offers a number of instances; she concentrates, however, on the specific motif of rape of a water fairy and the association of this with the motifs of drought and wasteland (218-19). For an analysis of this episode as part of an imperialist project, see Laurie Finke and Martin Shichtman, "The Mont St Michel Giant: Sexual Violence and Imperialism in the Chronicles of Wace and Lazamon", in Violence against Women in Medieval Texts, ed. Anna Roberts (Gainesville, 1998), pp. 56-74. Ipomedon in drei englischen Bearbeitungen, ed. Eugen Kolbing (Breslau, 1889), 11. 6482-83; 6504.

Corinne Saunders

160

The narrative intimates the impossibility of independent female existence: within the chivalric society depicted in the romance, women cannot defend themselves, and there is no recourse against the man who wins the woman's person in battle. Thus Alundyne swiftly accepts the expedient of marriage with the very knight who has killed her husband, while later the lady whom Ywain rescues from her besieger, Sir Alers, requests that he marry her: "Sir, if it be yowre will, I pray yow forto dwel here still; And I wil yelde into yowre handes Myn awyn body and al my landes".

(1959-62) The link between

lady and lands is made explicit, and the virtuous hero equated with the able defender.21 This situation is also acutely realised in the contemporaneous Sir Percyvell of Gales. Perceval describes the siege of the lady Lufamour's castle by a heathen sultan who desires her as his wife: "That scho may have no pese, The lady, for hir fayrenes And for hir mekill* reches, He wirkes hir full woo! He dose his sorow all hir sythe* And all he slaes doun ry[f]e;* He wolde have hir to wyfe, And scho will noghte soo".22

[*great]

[ life] [*in great numbers]

striking that while Perceval's defence of the lady simply enacts the precepts of chivalry, the battle between the two men becomes a battle for Lufamour's hand. She sees her own person as the right of her defender, and indeed employs the same terminology as the Sultan: "Scho thoght hym worthi to welde,* (*have) / And he myghte wyn hir in felde / With maystry and myghte" (1310-12). In the military society of romance, battle proves who is hero, who villain. The lady may be gained through force, but not force enacted on her body or by attacking her lands and castle: her It is

constmed as enforced of abduction threats of enforced or marriage. Episodes marriage stand in opposition to those where the lady is won through the honour and prowess of the knight, and military achievements for the lady are contrasted with attacks on her. Romance is in part consent is necessary in order to rewrite as love what could be

21

A similar instance is found in Guy of Warwick, where the Emperor offers Guy the hand of his daughter Clarice in return for defeating his attackers: see The Romance of Guy of Warwick, ed. Julius Zupitza, Early English Text Society, ES 42, 49, 59 (London, 1883, 1887, 1891), 11. 4177-90.

Percyvell of Gales, the Anturs of Arther, ed. Maldwyn Mills, Everyman's (London, Library 1992), pp. 103-60: 11. 981-88. All subsequent references to Sir Percyvell of Gales will be from this edition and cited by line number. Ywain and Gawain, Sir

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by the powerful classical paradigm of the abduction of Helen of Troy, which causes a war so great that the civilisation of Troy falls. The story perhaps underpins the numerous examples in medieval romance of knights who fight on behalf of abducted shadowed

ladies.

Religious writing offers an interesting set of contrasts to romance, and it is here that women may play a more active role in warfare even while the texts may recall the threat of sexual violence. It seems clear that, for medieval writers, there was great dramatic potential in subverting or opposing the traditional presentation of women as victims, by making them into powerful heroic figures but also that this was a problematic reversal of role, which tended to require a spiritual motivation. The great Biblical example of the woman warrior is that of the Old Testament heroine Judith, the Israelite who finds her way into the camp of Holofemes, the leader of the attacking Assyrian army, and kills him. This was evidently a problematic story, later relegated to the Apocrypha; it portrayed Judith as using her feminine wiles to seduce and then kill Holofemes. The poet of the Old English Judith (c.lOthC) uses hagiographie elements to -

-

like those of the Christian saints. Thus this Judith is identified as a holy virgin widow, and rather than seducing Holofemes, is absent from his feast. She is identified as the handmaiden of the Lord, who is authorised to take on a male, heroic role: she kills Holofemes and leads her troops in battle. Summoned to Holofemes' bedroom, Judith seems to usurp his military and sexual dominance by striking him with his own sword as he lies comatose on the bed, "swa heo dxs unlœdan eaöost mihte / wel gewealdan", "As she might best have power over.. the hated foe".23 Judith to some extent equates to the Christian saint, although her fate is very different. She kills her enemy and wins the battle, whereas the traditional hagiographie pattern is that of torture and martyrdom. The Golden Legend, the South English Legendary and Osbem Bokenham's Legends ofHooly Women contain one very striking example of this pattern in the context of warfare, the legend of Saint Ursula and the 11,000 virgins. Here the power of the virgin opposes an entire enemy host: Ursula puts off marriage to travel from Little Britain to Rome with a great company of English virgins in order to face the army of the pagan princes Julian, Maxim and Affrican at Cologne, and is finally cut down on the battlefield with her companions. Bokenham describes the pagan army: "As raueynows wuluys. / Among a flok of sheep", terms that recall the descriptions of the Vikings in chronicles. 24 It is notable that Bokenham is make the story

not

more

a

.

.

.

Judith, m A Choice ofAnglo-Saxon Verse, ed. and trans. Richard Hamer (London, 1970), pp. 1023; for an analysis of the ironic reversal of sexual role behaviour in this passage, see Jane Chance, 'The Structural Unity of Beowulf: The Problem of Grendel's Mother", in New Readings on Women in Old English Literature, eds. Helen Damico and Alexandra Hennessy Olsen (Bloomington, 1990), pp. 254-55. Osbem Bokenham, Legendys ofHooly Wummen, ed. Mary S. Serjeantson, Early English Text Society, OS 206 (London, 1938 for 1936), 11. 3415-16. All subsequent references to Bokenham will be from this edition and will be cited by line number.

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careful to downplay eroticism by emphasising the male presence in Ursula's company the pope, cardinals and bishops, and her own fiancé in spiritual marriage, Ethereus. The threat of sexual violence in warfare remains a silent motif, however: Ursula herself is spared in the battle and, because of her great beauty, her hand is requested by Julian in marriage. On refusing to consent, she is shot with an arrow from "a myhty bowe" (3435), her virginity maintained. The South English Legendary similarly uses the image of wolves among lambs to contrast the saintly women and their attackers: "Hi houede & cride zam assame to gronde hi ham slowe / Also fale wolues among lomb zare clene fleiss todrawe. The women are in one sense heroic warrior (II, 447, Judith but in victims. The legend's drama is partially situated in as figures is, another, the threat to the integrity of the female body posed by warfare, and specifically the threat of ravishment, the archetypal motif associated with the depiction of women in warfare. It is cmcial however, that the virginity of Ursula and her companions remain intact. Thus the women become mirrors of Christ's passion on the Cross, their bodies perfect in chastity but also torn and bleeding, willingly suffering wounds and death. Their unconquerable faith is set up against the hollow violence and warfare of the pagan enemy. Yet it is unrealistic to imagine that in actuality the world of medieval warfare was distinct from the world of women except in the case where the woman was the victim of ravaging armies or a warrior saint. As so often these powerful literary stereotypes paint only part of the picture. If the military sphere was not women's natural habitat, it certainly would have impinged in major ways on their private and domestic lives. It is instmctive to recall that during Chaucer's life, the period when writing in English reached its height, there was no time when England was not at war, while from the eleventh to the mid-fifteenth century the call to the Cmsades was repeatedly heard, and the ideal of regaining Jerusalem hovered luminously in the medieval imagination. Although it is difficult to reconstruct the experience of medieval women, there is no doubt that their lives would have been affected by the absences of fathers, brothers, lovers and husbands on military campaigns, including the Cmsades, and that given the difficulty of medieval travel such absences could have lasted for many years, even when the individual concerned was lucky enough to survive the almost insurmountable threats of wounds and disease. The large collection of letters written by and associated with the Paston family provide intriguing insights into the everyday experience of upper-class women in fifteenth-century England, including that of what might be called "dynastic warfare". In the second generation of Paston writers, the letters of the first John Paston's wife Margaret depict in particularly vivid terms the possible involvement of women in violence between families and factions. Margaret Paston's engagement with the traditionally male spheres of property, finance, law and arms is obvious throughout her -

.

"

.

South

.

English Legendary,

.

11.131-32).25

eds. Charlotte

d'Evelyn and Anna

vols, OS 235 and 236 (London, 1956), vol. 2, p. 447,11.131-32.

J. Mill,

Early English

Text

Society,

2

Sexual Violence in Wars

The Middle Ages

163

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letters. She took charge of the household but also of business affairs during her husband John's frequent absences, the result of his deep involvement in litigation over property throughout the course of his life: he was imprisoned three times. Margaret's letters to John relate her very direct experience of violence, yet her tone is never that of the victim; rather she writes with the voice of an equal, engaged with facts, rights and the practicalities of defences. In 1448, for instance she describes how the family chaplain James Gloys was set upon and attacked, fleeing to her mother's house, "And with be noise of bis as-saut and affray my modir and I came owt of pe chirche from be sakeryng": they offer Gloys shelter, are abused in "meche large langage", and take the case to the Prior of Norwich. In 1448, Lord Moleyns laid claim to John Paston's manor of Gresham, bought by Paston from Thomas Chaucer. Margaret writes not of her fear of attack but of her need for defences:

"Ryt wurchipful hwsbond, I recomawnd me to 311, and prey 3W to gete som crosse bowis, and wyndacis to bynd pern wyth, and quarell, for 3wr hwsis here ben so low bat pere may non man And also I wold 3e schete owt wyth no long bowe, bow we hadde neuer so moche nede. xuld gete ij or iij schort pelle-axis to kepe wyth doris, and als many jakkys, and 3e may".26 .

.

.

She describes in some detail the defences already made, but it is a token of the everyday aspect of such concerns that she ends her letter with shopping requests, "j li. of almandis and j li. of sugyre, and bat ze wille do byen summe frese to maken of zwr childeris gwnys" (Letter 130, 226-27).27 Margaret's defences were in vain: John's appeal to the King states that "his wife was forcibly driven out by 'a riotous people to the number of a thousand persons.'"28 In 1459 John became involved in a struggle over the property of Margaret's deceased relative Sir John Fastolf, whose will leaving Caister Castle and his many other manors to John Paston was bitterly contested by the other executors; John died in 1466 at the age of 45 with the dispute unresolved. The struggle was by no means exclusively legal: Margaret vividly describes attacks made by the Duke of Suffolk and a force of armed men on the manor of Hellesdon in 1465, "gret affrayes have ben made vppon me and my felashep" (Letter 188, 310), she writes that summer; in October, she describes how the Duke made their tenants "breke down the wallys of the place [the manor house] and the logge both" and "rensackyd the church and bare a-way all the gode that was lefte there" (Letter 196, 330). The threat of violent attack for Margaret is evident, "we kype here dayly more then xxx persons for sauacyon of ous and the place, for in very trowght and the place hadnot be kypyd strong the Duck had com hethere" (Letter 196, 331). The kind of treatment she might have received is Paston Letters and Papers of the Fifteenth Century, ed. Norman Davis, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1971, 1976), vol. 1, Letter 130, p. 226. All subsequent references to the Paston Letters will be from this edition, and will be cited by letter and page number (all in vol. I unless specified). I do not reproduce Davis's italics. This letter is also cited by Carolyne Larrington, Women and Writing in Medieval Europe: A Sourcebook (London, 1995). Paston Letters, ed. Davis (see above, n. 26), vol. 1, p. 13, note 1.

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suggested by a petition from one of John Fastolf s men, J. Payn, to John Paston in 1465. Payn is seized by Jack Cade and threatened with execution; later he is robbed and attacked, as is his wife: "And in Kent, ber as my wyf dwellyd, they toke a-wey all ovre godes mevabyll bat we had, and ber wolde haue hongyd my wyf and v of my chyldem, and lefte her no more gode but her kyrtyll and her smook". (Letter 692, II, 313). But what is most striking is Margaret's practical, robust tone, the familiarity with violence and her personal involvement. The Paston Letters demonstrate another perspective on women and warfare, suggesting that women might be involved in practical organisation of defence, taking on the male role. In medieval writing, then, the introduction of women into the male world of warfare allows for a series of powerful oppositions, crucial to the drama of literary representations of war. Women to some extent function as still points within the circles of warfare. The male action of battle is opposed by the static quality, though not necessarily the passivity, of the women who wait, weep and suffer. The taken or besieged body of the woman is set against the military actions in warfare of both attackers and defenders. The active, threatening desire of the enemy is opposed by the unassailable, still chastity of the virgin. Sexual violation and ravishment, however, are not the only motifs associated with women in warfare. Women may also play more powerful roles in the medieval writing of war. They encourage and incite those who fight; they also provide many of the incentives for the battles that structure the chivalric world and prove the hero. On occasion, they offer alternative, ethical perspectives that rely on ideas of mercy, pity and peace. But, as the rather different letters of Margaret Paston show, it is also the case that what is most full of potential for the medieval writer, the strong contrast and drama created by placing "woman" within the male world of warfare, is not necessarily the real experience of women in war.

Birgit Beck-Heppner

Gender Specific Crimes in Wars of the Modern Age

"The universal soldier, whether in the Red Army or the SS, in the U.S. Army or the French Foreign Legion, the Iraqi Army or the Serb irregulars, rapes and pillages innocent women; women as universal victim are the booty of every war, the unrecognized and uncompensated targets of war crimes."'

At first glance this enumeration made by the historian Atina Grossmann does not only refer to the historical dimension of sexual violence in wars of the modem age and its meaning as a common part of military warfare. It also gives the impression that wartime rape is a phenomenon which appears in a similar and comparable way in different wars at different times. Grossmann rightly points out, however, that the occurrence of sexual violence in wars cannot be understood in such a transhistorical manner because wartime rape is "both an intensely personal and a public, politically and historically constructed event".2 Trying to take this into consideration when giving a survey of the occurrence of sexual violence in wars of the modem age there are some basic difficulties as the investigation of gender specific crimes3 during wars from the early modem age to the 21st century is still a rather new field of research. Susan Brownmiller presented a wide-ranging compilation of wartime rape in her book "Against Our Will" already in 1975, when she gave a survey of the occurrence of sexual violence from the

2 3

Atina Grossmann, "A Question of Silence. The Rape of German Women by Soviet Occupation Soldiers", in Women and War in the Twentieth Century. Enlisted with or without Consent, ed. Nicole Ann Dombrowski (New York, 1999), pp. 162-83, here p. 165. Ibid. Boys and men, too, can be raped or sexually tortured in wars. The latest example is the war in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. An Amnesty International report reveals the high number of boys and men who became also victims of sexual violence. See Amnesty International, Democratic Republic of Congo: Mass rape time for remedies, http://web.amnesty.org/library/index/engafr620182004 (October 26, 2004). As girls and women represent the majority of victims in armed conflicts this kind of violence is described as a gender specific one. See Kelly Dawn Askin, War Crimes Against Women. Prosecution in International War Crimes Tribunals (The Hague, 1997), p. xvi. -

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ancient times to the present, including the Two World Wars, the Vietnam War and the incidents in Bangladesh in 1971.4 But it was above all the public outcry over the rapes of women during the war in the former Yugoslavia5, which has renewed scholarly interest in sexually related crimes in wars of the past and the present. Not only the incidents during the civil war in former Yugoslavia but also the crimes committed against girls and women at the end of the Second World War have become topics of research.6 In general most of the studies in the field have been published by sociologists or historians who work in the field of women and gender studies. Military historians have, however, not often dealt with the problem of wartime rape7 and although the socalled "military history of the ordinary soldier" has been established in the 1990s8 sexual violence in war for a long time seemed to be a taboo in military history. Although this discipline has taken up new aspects of social and cultural history or the history of mentalities the theories and problems of women and gender studies took a very long time to find their way into military history.9 While sexual violence in war is relatively well documented for the 20th century10 the wars of the 18th and 19th century" still require a much more thorough analysis. Some works on military history and war in the early modem age take up aspects of gender relationships such as women's role as vivandières or prostitutes in the retinue12 as well 4

5

6

7 8

9

Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will. Men, Women and Rape, 5th ed. (London, 1991). Alexandra Stiglmayer, ed, Massenvergewaltigung. Krieg gegen die Frauen (Freiburg/Br, 1993); Beverly Allen, Rape Warfare. The Hidden Genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia (Minneapolis, 1996); Norma von Ragenfeld-Feldman, "The Victimization of Women: Rape and the Reporting of Rape in Bosnia-Herzegovina, 1992-1993", Dialog. Internationale Zeitschrift für Kunst und Wissenschaft 6/21 (1997), pp. 3-26. Heike Sander and Barbara Johr, eds, BeFreler und Befreite. Krieg, Vergewaltigungen, Kinder, 2nd ed. (Munich, 1992). Martin van Creveld, Frauen und Krieg (Munich, 2001), especially chapter 1. Wolfram Wette, ed. Der Krieg des kleinen Mannes. Eine Militärgeschichte von unten, 2nd ed.

(Munich, 1995). Christa Hämmerle, "Von den Geschlechtem der Kriege und des Militärs. Forschungseinblicke und Bemerkungen zu einer neuen Debatte", in Was ist Militärgeschichte?, eds. Thomas Kühne and Benjamin Ziemann (Paderborn, 2000), pp. 229-62, especially p. 230. See also Karen Hagemann, '"We need not concern ourselves ...' Militärgeschichte Geschlechtergeschichte Männergeschichte: Anmerkungen zur Forschung", Traverse. Zeitschriftfür Geschichte 5/1 (1998), pp. 75-93. Hämmerle, "Von den Geschlechtern", pp. 257-61. The behaviour of British soldiers in Spain in 1812 is described by Gunther Rothenberg, "The Age of Napoleon", in The Laws of War. Constraints on Warfare in the Western World, eds. Michael Howard, George J. Andreopoulos and Mark R. Shulman (New Haven, 1994), pp. 86-97, here p. 93. und ist der jammer nit zu beschreiben'. Geschlechterbeziehungen und Bernhard R. Kroener, in der Lagergesellschaft des Dreißigjährigen Krieges", in Landsknechte, Überlebensstrategien Soldatenfrauen und Nationalkrieger. Militär, Krieg und Geschlechterordnung im historischen Wandel, eds. Karen Hagemann and Ralf Pröve (Frankfurt/Main, 1998), pp. 279-96; Matthias Rogg, Landsknechte und Reisläufer: Bilder vom Soldaten. Ein Stand in der Kunst des 16. Jahrhunderts (Paderborn, 2002), pp. 43-54. -

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12

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problem of sexual assaults.13 The dimension of gender specific crimes in colonial wars, however, has so far not been discussed in detail by historians. Although such armed conflicts can be characterized as typical models of transcultural wars and indications to the occurrence of rape exist for example in the German war against the Herero and Nama in the former German South West Africa (Namibia) from 1904 to 1907 or Italy's war against Ethiopia in 1935/3614 the current lack of empirical research makes it difficult to discuss the meaning of sexual violence in detail and to deal with transcultural wars only. This essay therefore will concentrate on that kind of war in which perceptions of cultural difference influenced the conduct of war15, but it as

the

-

-

will also include wars that are defined as intracultural wars in order to present overview of wartime rape and sexual assaults in the modem age.

an

The Function of Sexual Violence in War Due to the incidents during the war in the former Yugoslavia many authors have tried explain the function of wartime rape. Three of the main arguments will now be presented as most authors consider them to be helpful and applicable to various wars at different epochs. They can also reveal right at the beginning of the following statements the existing major problems when dealing with sexual violence in war. Some authors like Susan Brownmiller basing themselves on a patriarchally marked sex ratio interpret sexual violence in war only as the logical consequence of the oppression of women in "peaceful" times.16 They argue that the common rules and forms of behaviour are partly or even totally neutralized during wars or military conflicts. In this context sexual assaults on women would become a means to demonstrate and to reinforce the existing status of power.17 Other authors like Ruth Seifert stress the fact that in many societies the army is responsible for creating a special image of masculinity. The military can be characterized as the central institution to

13

14

15

16 17

John Theibault, "Landfrauen, Soldaten und Vergewaltigungen während des Dreißigjährigen Krieges", Werkstatt Geschichte 19 (1998), pp. 25-39. On the war against the Herero see Gesine Krüger, "Bestien und Opfer: Frauen im Kolonialkrieg", in Völkermord in Deutsch-Südwestafrika. Der Kolonialkrieg (1904-1908) in Namibia und seine Folgen, eds. Jürgen Zimmerer and Joachim Zeller (Berlin, 2003), pp. 142-59, especially pp. 14849, 154-55. The editors of this book include the time of captivity and therefore interpret the end of the war not in 1907 but in 1908. On the war in Ethiopia see Giulia Brogini Künzi, Der Abessinienkrieg 1935/36. Ein Kolonialkrieg oder ein Totaler Krieg? (Paderborn, forthcoming), especially chapter 3. See Stephen Morillo's article in this book. Brownmiller, Against Our Will, p. 32. Stefan Gose, "Männlichkeit, Militär und Vergewaltigung. Männliches Rollenverhalten als Ausgangsbasis sexueller Übergriffe in Kriegen", in Gewohnheitstäter. Männer und Gewalt, eds. Alexander Diekmann et al. (Cologne, 1994), pp. 78-104.

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masculinity by stylizing violence and emphazising heterosexual behaviour.18 Seifert argues that the discrimination of homosexual men and the that defines

exclusion of women from the army for centuries favoured the occurrence of sexual violence.19 With regard to the image of masculinity this argument seems to be plausible to a certain degree although one has to keep in mind that differences based on historical and cultural developments exist. Looking back to the early modem age and women's role in the retinue the picture of an exclusively male army cannot be maintained. Written sources as well as contemporary art clearly show that in spite of women's presence in the army sexual assaults occurred and were widely spread. At this time soldiers did not make a distinction concerning the treatment of non-combatants and the civil population between inhabitants of hostile, neutral oder even allied regions. They rather saw civilians as their enemy "to be despoiled and tortured at will".20 In the 20th century, for example during World War II in 1943 more than 800.000 women served as telegraph workers or nurses, fought as combat pilots or members of the tank crew in the Red Army or joined the partisans.21 Nevertheless, at the end of the war Soviet soldiers raped German women in the Eastern territories and later on in Berlin.22 These examples demonstrate that it is necessary to investigate the special circumstances in various wars to answer the question if and in what way in times of armed conflicts which represent the "culmination of militarized manliness" a special kind of violence between the sexes exists.23 In this context it will be a central aspect of further research to analyze if women's integration into the armed forces especially in the 20th century had any consequences and possibly to what extent.24 Besides these explanations most of the studies that deal with wartime rape mainly discuss the function of sexual violence as a strategic means of warfare. Already in 1975 -

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For the German example see Ute Frevert, "Das Militär als 'Schule der Männlichkeit'. Erwartungen, Angebote, Erfahrungen im 19. Jahrhundert", in Militär und Gesellschaft im 19. Jahrhundert, ed. Ute Frevert (Stuttgart, 1997), pp. 145-73. Ruth Seifert, "Krieg und Vergewaltigung. Ansätze zu einer Analyse", in Massenvergewaltigung. Krieg gegen die Frauen, ed. Alexandra Stiglmayer (Freiburg/Br, 1993), pp. 85-108, here pp. 9296; Ruth Seifert, Militär Kultur Identität. Individualisierung, Geschlechterverhältnisse und die soziale Konstruktion des Soldaten (Bremen, 1996). Ronald G. Asch, '"Wo der soldat hinkömbt, da ist alles sein': Military Violence and Atrocities in the Thirty Years War Re-examined", German History 18 (2000), pp. 291-309, here p. 293; Johannes Burkhardt, Der Dreißigjährige Krieg (Frankfurt/Main, 1992), p. 234. Barbara Alpern Engel, "The Womanly Face of War. Soviet Women Remember World War II", in Women and War in the Twentieth Century. Enlisted with or without Consent, ed. Nicole Ann Dombrowski (New York, 1999), pp. 138-59, here p. 139. See also Reina Pennington, "Offensive Women: Women in Combat in the Red Army", in Time to Kill. The Soldier's Experience of War in the West 1939-1945, eds. Paul Addison and Angus Calder (London, 1997), pp. 249-62. -

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Sander and Johr, eds, BeFreier. Hämmerte, "Von den Geschlechtem", p. 261. See the article of Christopher Dandeker, "Women in the military", in The Oxford Companion Military History, ed. Richard Holmes (Oxford, 2001), pp. 999-1002.

to

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of the Modern Age

Susan Brownmiller pointed to this aspect when she in war as symbolic acts:

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interpreted gender specific

crimes

"Rape by a conquering soldier destroys all remaining illusions of power and property for men of the defeated side. The body of a raped women becomes a ceremonial battlefield, a parade ground for the victor's trooping of the colors. The act that is played out upon her is a message passed between men vivid proof of victory for one and loss and defeat for the other."25 -

in former Yugoslavia this thesis was taken up again to explain the Serbian policy of "ethnic cleansing" in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia and the Kosovo.26 Especially the brutal behaviour of mainly paramilitary soldiers who robbed, killed and raped in order to terrorize Bosnian Muslims and expel them from towns and villages became known in the media.27 In this context the vague term "mass rape" was used to describe the dimension of the sexual assaults. Authors who interpreted the occurrence of sexual violence as a strategic means start out from the idea that the female body represents the common body of a society or community. This is symbolically expressed in the French "Marianne" or the "Statue of Liberty" of the United States of America. It is argued that sexual assaults on women or girls therefore would not be directed at the individual person only but at the enemy as a whole. In this sense sexual violence in wars could receive its strategic meaning by not only harming the victims but also by intimidating and demoralizing the whole of an enemy's society.28 All explanations have in common that they are seldom based on empirical research and therefore often neglect the historical context and the differences that can exist due to cultural, religious, political, military or social preconditions. They neglect the fact that both groups and individuals undergo and interpret not only sexual violence but violence in general in different ways. Simply to generalize is therefore very problematic.29 Moreover many authors equate the behaviour of individual men from the outset with the intentions of the military or the political leadership. Any punishments or the imposing of sanctions against perpetrators of atrocities are also not taken into consideration in such

During the

war

generalizing arguments. Brownmiller, Against Our Will, p. 38. Norman L. Cigar, Genocide in Bosnia. The Policy of "Ethnic Cleansing" (College Station, Tex., 1995), pp. 47-61. Norman M. Naimark, Fires of Hatred. Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Centwy Europe (Cambridge, Mass., 2001), pp. 159-70. Naimark calls rape in Bosnia "not simply an instrument of ethnic cleansing but a form of genocide". Ibid. p. 169. Ruth Seifert, "Der weibliche Körper als Symbol und Zeichen. Geschlechtsspezifische Gewalt und die kulturelle Konstruktion des Krieges", in Gewalt im Krieg. Ausübung, Erfahrung und Verweigerung von Gewalt in Kriegen des 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. Andreas Gestrich (Münster, 1996), pp. 1333. Paul Hugger, "Elemente einer Kulturanthropologie der Gewalt", in Gewalt. Kulturelle Formen in Geschichte und Gegenwart, eds. Paul Hugger and Ulrich Stadler (Zurich, 1995), pp. 17-27, here pp. 19-21; Roy Porter, "Rape Does it have a Historical Meaning?", in Rape. An Historical and Cultural Enquiry, eds. Sylvana Tomaselli and Roy Porter (Oxford, 1989), pp. 216-36, here p. 220. -

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the use of the term "mass rape" is problematic. On the one hand rape is not the only form of sexual violence that occurs in war. Sexual violence in wartime can take many forms, for example apart from rape in general there are attempted rape, sexual torture, sexual mutilation, the abuse of children or enforced prostitution. All the crimes mentioned can occur at different stages of an armed conflict, in connection with the use of further physical violence or by threatening the victim with weapons and they can even end with the death of the victim, as various wars show.30 On the other hand the vague term "mass" points to a central problem: the quantitative dimension. For two

reasons

The Dimension of Gender Specific Crimes Estimations with regard to the quantitative dimension of sexual assaults only exist for the 20th century. There are no statistics for sexual violence in the early modem age, but various contemporary sources indicate for example for the Thirty Years War that sexual violence was a common phenomenon that went hand in hand with the war itself.31 Moreover gender specific crimes are often portrayed by contemporary drawings, paintings or etchings. The artists' clear accentuation of such topics could be interpreted as an indication for the widespread occurrence of sexual violence in armed conflicts of the early modem age.32 Geoffrey Mortimer, however, points out that there are also contemporary testimonies that describe rape not as the norm but rather as the

exception.33

Although the problem of sexual violence in wars at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th century still needs to be examined in detail, some authors call rape during the Napoleonic wars and the Wars of Liberation a "mass fate" (Massenschicksal), too. They point to the fact of the rising rate of illegitimate births and to other sources that explicitly name sexual assaults.34 The fact that unmarried pregnant German women See Astrid Aafjes, Gender Violence: The Hidden War Crime, eds. Anne Tiemey Goldstein and Margaret A. Schüler (Washington, D.C, 1998), pp. 14-15. Especially during the civil war and genocide in Rwanda in 1994 many women were "brutally killed after being raped". Gérard Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis. History of a Genocide 1959-1994 (London, 1995), p. 256. Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen, Der Abentheurliche Simplicissimus Teutsch und Continuatio des abentheurltchen Simplicissimi, ed. Rolf Tarot, 2nd ed. (1669, repr. Tübingen, 1984); Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen, Lebensbeschreibung der Ertzbetrügerin und Landstörtzerln Courasche, ed. Wolfgang Bender (1670, repr. Tübingen, 1967), p. 18. Rogg, Landsknechte, pp. 54-58. Geoffrey Mortimer, "Individual Experience and Perception of the Thirty Years War in Eyewitness Personal Accounts", German History 20 (2002), pp. 141-60, here pp. 152-55. Ute Planert, "Wessen Krieg? Welche Erfahrung? Oder: Wie national war der 'Nationalkrieg' gegen Napoleon?", in Der Krieg in religiösen und nationalen Deutungen der Neuzelt, ed. Dietrich Beyrau (Tübingen, 2001), pp. 111-39, here p. 118. See also Irmtraud Götz von Olenhusen, "Sexualisierte Gewalt. Eine historische Spurensuche vom 18. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart", in Das Quälen des

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during the 18' century blamed a soldier for having raped them in order to avoid punishment for their pre-marital sexual intercourse and the acceptance of this explanation by the courts is also interpreted by some authors as proof that sexual assaults committed by soldiers were common at the time.35 Looking back to the 20th century more concrete estimations are only available in cases where sexual violence took place in a special region or city. The Japanese army for example is not only notorious for having committed countless crimes against enemy soldiers or prisoners of war and for having used civilians for terrible medical or bacteriological experiments during the war in East Asia between 1937 and 1945.36 Sexual crimes played an important role, too, during Japan's attempt to subjugate East Asia. One of the incidents immediatley became known as the "rape of Nanjing" a term that explicitly describes what had happened in the Chinese capital. When in December 1937 the Japanese army conquered Nanking sexual assaults also occurred besides the welkknown mass killings, public beheadings and general looting. It is estimated that between 20,000 and 80,000 women were raped by Japanese soldiers.37 This great discrepancy concerning the figures of assaulted women reveal that a concrete calculation is not possible although the Japanese commanders were charged with the incidents in Nanking at the "International Military Tribunal for the Far East" in Tokyo in 1946.38 The occurrences in Nanking recurred to some extent when the Japanese army refused to surrender and tortured, killed and also raped Filipino civilians at Manila in -

1945. Estimations for this case are not available up to know so that the dimension of sexual assaults must remain unclear.39 With regard to the Second World War the raping of German women by soldiers of the Red Army is a welkknown and relatively detailed investigated subject, above all the incidents in Berlin in 1945. Heike Sander and Barbara Johr, who have analyzed local hospitals' data regarding veneral diseases and abortions, estimate that more than 110,000 female inhabitants of Berlin were raped by Soviet soldiers, above all between Eine historische Anthropologie der Folter, eds. Peter Burschel, Götz Distelrath and Sven Lembke (Cologne, 2000), pp. 217-36, here p. 228. Ute Frevert, Die kasernierte Nation. Militärdienst und Zivilgesellschaft in Deutschland (Munich, 2001), p. 24. Sheldon H. Harris, Factories of Death. Japanese Biological Warfare 1932-45 and the American

Körpers.

Cover-Up (London, 1995).

Katsuichi Honda, The Nanjing Massacre. A Japanese Journalist Confronts Japan's National Shame, ed. Frank Gibney (Armonk, N.Y., 1999), pp. xi-xiv; Uwe Makino, "Terror als Eroberungsund Herrschaftstechnik. Zu den japanischen Verbrechen in Nanking 1937/38," m Kriegsverbrechen im 20. Jahrhundert, eds. Wolfram Wette and Gerd R. Ueberschär (Darmstadt, 2001), pp. 343-55. Askin, War Crimes, pp. 179-85. For the Tribunal see R. John Pritchard and Sonia Magbanua Zaide, eds., The Tokyo War Crimes Trial, 27 vols. (New York, 1981). Gerhard L. Weinberg, A World at Arms. A Global History of World War II (Cambridge, Mass., 1994), pp. 860-63; John W. Dower, War without Mercy. Race and Power in the Pacific War (New

York, 1986), pp. 44-45.

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Taking this as a basis they project the number of fathered children to 1,100.40 In Vienna and Budapest sexual assaults were also committed by soldiers of the Red Army. The rough estimates vary from 5,000 to 200,000 incidents but as Andrea Petö emphasizes it "is widely accepted that 10 percent of the female population in Budapest was raped".41 According to Wendy Jo Gertjejanssen and her recently finished thesis it is important here to stress the fact that soldiers of the Red Army did not only committ sexual crimes in Germany, Austria and Hungary but also in Soviet, Polish, Baltic and Ukrainian areas. She has analyzed documents in local archives and made interviews with people in Latvia and the Ukraine. Although the single fates mentioned do not allow to draw a conclusion on the dimension of these incidents Gertjejanssen uses the term "mass raping" to describe the spreading of sexual violence 42 Summarizing the current attempts to calculate the dimension of wartime rape one has to agree with the historian Irmtraud Götz von Olenhusen that a comparison of the dimension of sexual violence in wars, civil wars and genocide is not only very difficult but may even not be possible at all, because of the high number of unreported cases and the lack of suitable sources.43 Especially the problem of unreported cases is a very important one here. Already in times of peace the number of unreported cases concerning sexual crimes or sexual offences is particularly high. It is estimated that in Germany and the USA only one of 20 or even 50 sexual crimes is reported to the police and it can be assumed that in times of war this discrepancy is much greater.44 April and June to

1945.

11,000 and the number of born children

The Prosecution of Sexual Violence in War In order to understand the meaning of sexual violence in wars of the modem age it seems to be more revealing how the military itself dealt with such crimes than to look only at the rough numbers. Although we still need a more detailed analysis of this aspect some results already indicate that in spite of existing rape bans armies in various wars did not prosecute the perpetrators to a large extent. Sander and Johr, eds, BeFreier, pp. 48-57, especially p. 54. Andrea Petö, "Memory and the Narrative of Rape in Budapest and Vienna in 1945", in Life after Death. Approaches to a Cultural and Social History of Europe During the 1940s and 1950s, eds. Richard Bessel and Dirk Schumann (Cambridge, England, 2003), pp. 129-48, here p. 132. Wendy Jo Gertjejanssen, Victims, Heroes, Survivors. Sexual Violence on the Eastern Front during World War II, unpublished thesis (University of Minnesota, 2004), pp. 318-45. Götz von Olenhusen, "Sexualisierte Gewalt", p. 222. Ulrike Brockhaus and Maren Kolshorn, Sexuelle Gewalt gegen Mädchen und Jungen. Mythen, Fakten, Theorien (Frankfurt/Main, 1993), p. 47; Verena Zurbriggen, "Sexuelle Gewalt, im besonderen gegen Frauen", in Gewalt. Kulturelle Formen in Geschichte und Gegenwart, eds. Paul Hugger and Ulrich Stadler (Zurich, 1995), pp. 299-320, here p. 301.

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As John Theibault has found out both civil and military law described rape as a serious crime that during the early modem age could even be punished by death. Nevertheless, neither ordinary courts nor military courts or court martials convicted many perpetrators. The victims' social position and reputation played an important role as to whether proceedings were opened. Women had to provide conclusive proof of their good reputation in order that their accusations were taken seriously. So-called dishonourable women were almost never successful in their accusations.45 During the Napoleonic wars the French army not only forced civilians in enemy territory to supply her with food, material and other goods. The soldiers also committed various atrocities and had not to fear any punishment as the following statement of a French officer reveals. In 1793 he described the behaviour of his unit in German villages as following: '"We loaded the wagons with all we could find [...] the peasants were abused, sometimes killed; the women raped; everything was permitted.'"46 This not only characterizes the brutal procedure of the army but also indicates that such crimes were obviously not punished at all. German press reports from 1813 and 1814 also took up the topic of sexual violence in order to explain the existing hate of the French and in this context interpreted the rape of German girls and women by soldiers as an expression of the "depravity" of the French.47 In contrast to this Alexander M. Martin states in an essay on the Napoleonic occupation of Moscow in 1812 that the French soldiers were accused of harassment, robbery and also murder. But the

"only imaginable outrage of which the Napoleonic troops were not generally accused was and at times found rape, perhaps because the soldiers expected opportunities for nonviolent fraternization with Russian women trapped in a situation of widespread hunger, homelessness and violence".48 -

-

It cannot be verified at this point whether Martin's argument is correct or not. But the example of the French army shows on the one hand that general statements on the occurrence of sexual assaults in a war are inadmissible and on the other hand it refers to the meaning of sexual violence in war propaganda which will be discussed later on. In Nanking in 1937 rape was forbidden by military law, too, but although sexual assaults in many cases ended with the mutilation and murder of the victims, both

officers and the military police did not prevent soldiers from committing such crimes. Neither did they take any steps against the perpetrators later on. Uwe Makino considers

Theibault, "Landfrauen", pp. 31-32. See also Karin Jansson, "Soldaten und Vergewaltigung im Schweden des 17. Jahrhunderts", in Zwischen Alltag und Katastrophe. Der Dreißigjährige Krieg aus der Nähe, eds. Benigna von Krusenstjern and Hans Medick (Göttingen, 1999), pp. 195-225. Cited by Geoffrey Wawro, Warfare and Society in Europe, 1792-1914 (London, 2000), p. 5. Karen Hagemann, "Mannlicher Muth und Teutsche Ehre". Nation, Militär und Geschlecht zur Zeit der Antinapoleonischen Kriege Preußens (Paderborn, 2002), pp. 219-22, 248. Alexander M. Martin, "The Response of the Population of Moscow to the Napoleonic Occupation of 1812", in 77îe Military and Society in Russia 1450-1917, eds. Eric Lohr and Marshall Poe (Leiden, 2002), pp. 469-89, here pp. 474-75. Italics in the original text.

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this "more or less clearly signaled immunity from criminal prosecution" as the main reason for the occurrence of rapes.49 Herbert P. Bix mentions a regiment's order from November 1937 that told Japanese soldiers to make no distinction between Chinese combatants and civilians. Rather should they treat everyone outside the walls of Nanking '"as anti-Japanese and destroy them ..."' Such an order could perhaps explain the occurrence of mass plundering, killing and raping later on. Nevertheless, according to Bix between August 1937 and the end of 1939 420 Japanese soldiers were convicted by military courts for the rape and killing of female Chinese. But he also states: "Yet no Japanese soldier was ever executed for such crimes."50 One exception was General Matsui Iwane, the commander-in-chief of the Japanese forces in Central China from 1937 to 1938, who was found guilty of the crimes in Nanking and sentenced to death in the Tokyo war crimes trial.51 With regard to the rapes committed by Soviet soldiers at the end of the Second World War it is known that some perpetrators were whipped or even shot dead, but especially in the first weeks of the occupation the majority of them was not prosecuted. As German women's memoirs and diaries reveal commanding officers did not intervene when Germans complained about the bmtal behaviour of Soviet troops.52 Also Gertjejanssen emphasizes that it was "practically useless for a woman to complain to the Soviet authorities about rape". In this context she mentions the Russian author, dissident and political officer of the Red Army, Lev Kopelev, who describes several examples of sexual assaults for which no disciplinary action was taken. Due to such reports and interviews with Soviet veterans Gertjejanssen draws the conclusion that there existed an "official condoning of rape".53 According to Norman Naimark this changed only after 1949, when harsher sentences were pronounced for rape.54 On the eastern front the German army ignored the mles of international law and military jurisdiction from the beginning of the Second World War. In accordance with the "Barbarossa decree on military jurisdiction on the Eastern front" of 13 May 1941 all crimes committed by soldiers against the civilian population were not to be punished by court martial unless this was necessary to maintain military discipline. Sexual assaults were in some cases characterized as such a serious danger to the discipline that more than 5.300 soldiers of the Wehrmacht were prosecuted because of "crimes and offences

50

51

52

53 54

Makino, "Terror", pp. 346-47; quotation p. 346, translation by the author; Honda, Nanjing Massacre, pp. 121, 154-61. Herbert P. Bix, Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (London, 2001), pp. 332-35, quotations pp. 333, 335.

Bernard V. A. Röling, The Tokyo Trial and Beyond. Reflections of a Peacemonger, ed. Antonio Cassese (Cambridge, 1993), p. 4. Anonyma, Eine Frau in Berlin. Tagebuchaufzeichnungen vom 20. April bis 22. Juni 1945 (Frankfurt/Main, 2003), p. 64. Gertjejanssen, Victims, pp. 341-45, quotations pp. 341, 344. Norman M. Naimark, Die Russen in Deutschland. Die sowjetische Besatzungszone 1945 bis 1949 (Berlin, 1997), pp. 20, 103, 124-25.

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moral conduct" between 1939 and 1944 and punished with detention, prison penalty.55 Various military documents exist which reveal that the High Command of the German Army (Oberkommando des Heeres) obviously did not regard rape in general as a very serious crime. On July 5, 1940 the commander-in-chief of the Army, Waither von Brauchitsch, informed the commanders of the German armies about how courts martial were to deal with rapists. He explained that he strongly condemned rape, but that "during the operations and occupation, soldiers must cope with circumstances that differ considerably from those at home"; therefore, he counseled, "straying once from the path of moral decency" should not be punished as severely as it would be "under normal circumstances".56 Court verdicts moreover reveal that soldiers on the eastern front were sometimes punished with more lenient sentences than on the western front because judges were influenced by National Socialist and racist patterns of thought. Accordingly they did not interpret the rape of a Russian woman as a serious crime.57 This example refers to the problem of racism and sexual violence which is of special interest with regard to transcultural wars and will be discussed in the following.

against

sentences or even with the death

The Meaning of Racism in Transcultural Wars As Gisela Bock has rightly emphasized the politics of racism58 cannot be understood without the consideration of its gender specific impacts.59 As racist language itself is characterized by a mixture of sexuality and violence it is important to analyze the influence of racial stereotypes in transcultural wars and their impact on the occurrence of sexual assaults. The first example mentioned in this context does at first sight not fit into the concept of a transcultural war as during the American Civil War between 1861 and 1865 two societies fought each other who shared common traditions, values and political ideas.

Hennicke, "Auszüge aus der Wehrmachtkriminalstatistik", Zeitschrift für Militärgeschichte 5 (1966), pp. 438-56, here p. 454. Federal Archive Zentralnachweisstelle Kornelimünster, RH 15a G/8, Disziplin und Rechtspflege, ObdH GenQu (III). GenStdH, Nr. 16098/40, 5 July 1940. Italics in the original. Birgit Beck, "Rape. The Military Trials of Sexual Crimes Committed by Soldiers in the Wehrmacht, 1939-1944", in Home/Front. The Military, War and Gender in Twentieth-Centwy Germany, eds. Karen Hagemann and Stefanie Schüler-Springorum (Oxford, 2002), pp. 255-73, here pp. 262-65. See also Birgit Beck, Wehrmacht und sexuelle Gewalt. Sexualverbrechen vor deutschen Militärgerichten 1939-1945 (Paderborn, 2004), pp. 285-92. For the historical construction and meanings of racism see Neil MacMaster, Racism in Europe 1870-2000 (Houndmills, 2001). Gisela Bock, "Geschichte, Frauengeschichte, Geschlechtergeschichte", Geschichte und Gesellschaft. Zeitschrift fur Historische Sozialwissenschaft 14 (1988), pp. 364-91, here pp. 389-90. Otto

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Nevertheless Southerners themselves interpreted the war as a necessary conflict to defend not only their land and their families but also their culture based on the system of slavery.60 During this war the distinction between soldiers and civilians vanished and General William Sherman's infamous "march to the sea" marked the peak of this development. In order to demoralize the citizens of Georgia and the Carolinas his troops devastated the countryside by burning and looting.6' At the same time, however, Sherman prohibited sexual assaults on Southern women and the killing of civilians whom he accepted as "errant fellow-civilians".62 During the guerrilla war that broke out in the border states both sides also stuck to specific cultural values such as the honourable treatment of women and children by men. Yet only white women could claim this code of honour for themselves, because they were accepted as members of the same racial community. Unlike white women black and Indian women were defined by race as belonging to the "Other" and were raped not only by guerrilla, but also by

regular soldiers.63 Such attitudes played an important role, too, during a war that is described by Jürgen Zimmerer as one of the most destmctive colonial wars of history and the first genocide of the 20th century: the war against the Herero and Namas from 1904 to 1907 in German South West Africa.64 Under the command of Lieutnant General Lothar von Trotha who interpreted colonial war as a racial war the German colonial army defeated part of the Herero people in August 1904 at the Waterberg and then began to push the remaining ones to the Omaheke desert where thousands of them died of thirst under terrible circumstances. The military administration also established concentration camps to detain combattants as well as women, children and old people.65 As contemporary testimonies reveal women were not only beaten and forced to do hard labour but were sexually abused and raped, too. The dramatic increase of veneral diseases among the prisoners of war and the colonial army must be seen in this context although one has to stress here explicitly that such an increase cannot automatically

Beringer, "Confederate Identity and the Will to Fight", in On the Road to Total War. The American Civil War and the German Wars of Unification, 1861-1871, eds. Stig Förster and Jörg Nagler (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 75-100, here p. 86. James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom. The Civil War Era (New York, 1988), pp. 809-11, Richard E.

825-27. Michael Fellman, "At the Nihilist Edge: Reflections on Guerrilla Warfare during the American Civil War", in On the Road to Total War. The American Civil War and the German Wars of Unification, 1861-1871, eds. Stig Förster and Jörg Nagler (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 519-40, here p. 535. Ibid. pp. 523, 527-32. Jürgen Zimmerer, "Krieg, KZ und Völkermord in Südwestafrika. Der erste deutsche Genozid", in Völkermord in Deutsch-Südwestafrika. Der Kolonialkrieg (1904-1908) in Namibia und seine Folgen, eds. Jürgen Zimmerer and Joachim Zeller (Berlin, 2003), pp. 45-63, here p. 45. Ibid. pp. 55-58.

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with sexual violence. Nevertheless, colonial literature, official documents, press articles and soldiers' diaries clearly demonstrate that some not all soldiers and officers in the colonial army shared Trotha's opinion of the war as a racial war, in which not only the combattants but the whole people had to be exterminated. It seems that this attitude as well as the fact that Herero women joined the battle contributed to their mistreatment. Especially captured women became victims of sexual violence the perpetrators were not only soldiers but also white civilians.67 The link between racism and sexual violence also seems to play a vital role during the Japanese war in East Asia and during the Vietnam War. In his book on the Pacific War John Dower analyzes how severely racism influenced the conduct of war on both the Japanese and Allied side. He emphasizes that racial stereotypes and the "dehumanization of the Other" made the war merciless and that such attitudes resulted in innumerable atrocities. It was amongst other things especially the way both the Japanese government and the military saw themselves as the "leading race" in East Asia that defined the image of the enemy.68 Apart from the "Rape of Nanjing" and the incidents in Manila that have already been described one also has to mention the socalled "comfort women"-system when dealing with sexual violence in the Pacific war. The euphemistic term "comfort women" refers to an estimated number of 80.000 to 200.000 women who had to work under brutal and harsh conditions as prostitutes for the soldiers in Japanese military brothels. More than 80 percent of these "comfort women" came from Korea, the remaining ones from Taiwan, China, the Philippines, Indonesia or Vietnam, parts of the world that the Japanese political and military leadership considered to be "inferior".69 This system of enforced prostitution must be seen as a special form of sexual violence in war. Above all it is an example for the cooperation between the military and government officials "as an instance of statecontrolled criminal activity involving the sexual exploitation of women".70 The Japanese army was not the only one that established brothels with women of the occupied countries working as prostitutes. As several new studies reveal the Wehrmacht, too, set up medically supervised brothels in order to prevent the spread of veneral diseases and the occurrences of homosexual relationships within the army. On both the western and eastern fronts military brothels existed and Insa Meinen's work on the occupied parts of France has shown that the army not only recruited women who

equated

-

-

-

Joachim Zeller, '"Ombepera i koza Die Kälte tötet mich'. Zur Geschichte des Konzentrationslagers in Swakopmund (1904-1908)", in Völkermord in Deutsch-Südwestafrika. Der Kolonialkrieg (1904-1908) in Namibia und seine Folgen, eds. Jürgen Zimmerer and Joachim Zeller (Berlin, 2003), pp. 64-79, here pp. 70, 74. Krüger, "Bestien und Opfer", pp. 152-55. -

Dower, War, pp. 3-14, quotation p. 11. George Hicks, The Comfort Women. Japan's Brutal Regime ofEnforced Prostitution in the Second World War (New York, 1995); Yoshiaki Yoshimi, Comfort Women. Sexual Slavery in the Japanese Military during World War II(New York, 2000), pp. 29, 91-93. Yuki Tanaka, Hidden Horrors. Japanese War Crimes in World War II (Boulder, Col., 1996), p. 99.

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in French brothels but in some cases also forced women from become internment camps to prostitutes in a Wehrmacht brothel.71 At the eastern front new brothels were established in most instances and women were forced to work there, too. It is also known that women and girls mainly Jewish or Polish from German concentration camps like Ravensbriick were sent to Wehrmacht and SS brothels. This happened despite an order of the High Command of the German Army that prohibited the use of Jewish women. As Gertjejanssen emphasizes in her work women from Germany, Poland, the Ukraine, Russia and the Baltic countries worked in military brothels because they were forced to do so or because of economic reasons.72 Although it is not possible to estimate the number of women who were forced to work in brothels the problem of enforced prostitution as a special form of sexual violence can not be neglected in a discussion of this topic. With regard to the occurrence of sexual violence at the end of World War II Gertjejanssen takes up the argument of cultural or ethnic differences which is used by some authors to explain the fact that soldiers of the Red Army from the Far East raped women on "'friendly' Soviet territory". She thinks it could be possible that these men attacked women and girls because they belonged to a different cultural or ethnic group. But she also rightly points out that "this does not seem to be an adequate explanation with the evidence available so far and without knowing more definitely which troops

were

already working

-

-

raped more".73 Although sexual violence during the Vietnam War has not been discussed in detail it

seems that racism and cultural differences contributed to the occurrence of numerous atrocities. Not only torture and murder but sexual assaults were also "frequently reported" by Vietnam veterans who were questioned about their experiences.74 One example for such incidents is the notorious massacre of My Lai which happened on March 16, 1968. Soldiers of the "Charlie Company" killed about 500 civilians and raped girls and women or "ripped vaginas open with knives". These atrocities were made known to the public when in 1970 some officers and enlisted men were charged with criminal offences. Only one of the accused was found guilty and convicted.75 As the term "double veteraning" makes clear such atrocities were not the exception. It stands for gang raping and afterwards killing a Vietnamese woman or girl at the time. As the example of My Lai shows many women were not only raped but also sexually tortured and mutilated. To explain this brutal behaviour some authors refer to a 71 72

Meinen, Wehrmacht und Prostitution im besetzten Frankreich (Bremen, 2002), pp. 179-85. Gertjejanssen, Victims, pp. 154-225. See also Helga Amesberger, Katrin Auer and Brigitte

73

2004), pp. 136-39. Gertjejanssen, Victims, p. 335.

Insa

Halbmayr,

74

75

Sexualisierte Gewalt. Weibliche

Erfahrungen

In

NS-Konzentrattonslagern (Vienna,

Bourke, An Intimate History ofKilling. Face-to-Face Killing in Twentieth-Century Warfare (London, 2000), p. 179. See also Brownmiller, Against Our Will, pp. 86-113. Bourke, Intimate History, pp. 171-81, quotation p. 172; Brownmiller, Against Our Will, pp. 103Joanna

05.

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"cultural clash" and the fact that the enemy was considered to be racially different or simply characterized as inhuman. This is also expressed in the term "gooks" that was used by GIs when they spoke of Vietnamese men or women.76

The Propagandist Meaning of Sexual Violence The connection between racist attitudes and sexual violence can also be found in wartime propaganda. During the war against the Herero which was already mentioned the German propaganda in the Reich and in the colony paid special attention to the fate of German women and gave detailed reports on raped and murdered farmers' wives. Although most of these reports were not true as the Herero predominantly spared women they were nevertheless very popular. According to Gesine Krüger the image of "black beasts" was used on the one hand to justify an expansive war with heavy losses. On the other hand German soldiers could rationalize their own behaviour as the killing of women and children did not match with their opinions of German soldiering.77 During the First World War, too, the image of the colonial and especially the black soldier as a "bloodthirsty savage" was common in Germany.78 Such assumptions of "an aggressive black sexuality" had been widespread already in the 19th century79 and turned up again as European armies fell back on men from the colonies. Especially during the occupation of the Rhineland alleged sexual assaults by colonial soldiers became the main topic of German propaganda.80 It characterized members of black units as "diseased animals who roamed the Rhineland in packs, gang-raping German mothers and virgins, infecting the nation (...)". This image and the propagandistic term "Die Schwarze Schmach" did not only find expression in the press but was also spread Michael Hochgeschwender, '"Mired in Stalemate': Zur Geschichte vietnamesischer und amerikanischer Kinder und Jugendlicher im Vietnamkrieg (1964-1975)", in Kinder und Jugendliche in Krieg und Revolution. Vom Dreißigjährigen Krieg bis zu den Kindersoldaten Afrikas, ed. Dittmar Dahlmann (Paderborn, 2000), pp. 169-202, here pp. 186-87, 193; Bourke, Intimate History, pp. 204-8. The My Lai trial not included there were only 36 court martials for war crimes committed between 1965 and 1973, 16 per cent of them for rape. Krüger, "Bestien und Opfer", pp. 147-51. Christian Koller, "Enemy Images. Race and Gender Stereotypes in the Discussion on Colonial Troops. A Franco-German Comparison, 1914-1923", in Home/Front. The Military, War and Gender in Twentieth-Century Germany, eds. Karen Hagemann and Stefanie Schüler-Springorum (Oxford, 2002), pp. 139-57, here p. 141. Ronald Hyam, Empire and Sexuality. The British Experience (Manchester, 1992), p. 204. Christian Koller, 'Von Wilden aller Rassen niedergemetzelt'. Die Diskussion um die Vei-wendung von Kolonialtruppen in Europa zwischen Rassismus, Kolonial- und Militärpolitik (1914-1930) (Stuttgart, 2001); Sandra Maß, "Das Trauma des weißen Mannes. Afrikanische Kolonialsoldaten in propagandistischen Texten, 1914-1923", L'Homme. Zeitschrift fiir Feministische Geschichtswissenschaft 12/1 (2001), pp. 11-33, here pp. 23-32.

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through posters, postcards and leaflets.81 Similar images can be found during the Pacific War in posters portraying Japanese soldiers who carry off naked white women.82 During World War II the National Socialist propaganda warned German women and girls about the so-called "subhumans" (Untermenschen) and especially the uncivilized "Mongols" who would murder, loot and rape. In the western regions people were told to fear the "negroes" who were portrayed by the propaganda as "ape-like" and "driven by instinctual urges".83 As the articles on the image of the enemy84 reveal it is inevitable for analyzing transcultural wars to take this aspect into consideration. The above mentioned examples show that in this context the image of the opponent as a "rapist" plays a vital part in order to create both a brutal and dangerous enemy. The so-called "Greuelpropaganda" during World War I included numerous reports on sexual violence committed by German soldiers against Belgian and French women and it is obvious that in this war between European armies, too, the image of the raping enemy was used to mobilize volunteers and to strengthen the resistance.85 Further research on this aspect is therefore necessary to find out whether there is a specific meaning of such propaganda in transcultural

wars or

not.

The Development of International Law Finally it is interesting to glance briefly at the development of the international law and the meaning of sexual violence as a war crime. In his work "De iure belli ac pacis" Hugo Grotius already in 1625 took the view that a soldier who raped a woman during a war should be punished. In his "Instructions for the Government of Armies of the United States in the Field" of 1863, also known as "General Orders No. 100", Francis Lieber prescribed the death penalty for rape.86 In 1899 and 1907 the "Hague Rules of ' 2

3

4 5

6

MacMaster, Racism, p. 130. Dower, War, p. 189. Grossmann, Question, p. 167; Regina Mühlhäuser, "Vergewaltigungen in Deutschland 1945. Nationaler Opferdiskurs und individuelles Erinnern betroffener Frauen", in Nachkrieg in Deutschland, ed. Klaus Naumann (Hamburg, 2001), pp. 384-408, here p. 394. Quotations in MacMaster, Racism, p. 132. See the articles of Hannes Möhring and Michael Hochgeschwender in this book. Ruth Harris, "The 'Child of the Barbarian': Rape, Race and Nationalism in France during the First World War", Past and Present 141 (1993), pp. 170-206; John Home and Alan Kramer, German Atrocities, 1914. A History of Denial (New Haven, 2001), especially pp. 75, 199; Daniel Marc Segesser, "The International Debate on the Punishment of War Crimes during the Balkan Wars and the First World War," 2004 Annual Meeting Session Papers of the American Historical Association (Ann Arbor: UMI, 2004). "Instructions for the Government of Armies of the United States in the Field. Prepared by Francis Lieber, promulgated as General Orders No. 100 by President Lincoln, 24 April 1863", in Dietrich

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Land Warfare" defined the rules of international law with respect to the laws and customs of war still in force today. As to the protection of female civilians it stressed that the "honour and the rights of the family" should be respected.87 After World War I the Allied war crimes commission specified 32 offences as violations of the laws and customs of war and included rape and enforced prostitution.88 The statute of the "International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg" did not explicitly include rape as a crime but the Local Council Law No. 10 which was the basis for later trials listed rape explicitly as a crime against humanity. No one was, however, punished for sexual aussaults.89 The Geneva Conventions of 1949 and the additional protocols of 1977 which deal with the protection of the civilian population in war defined sexual assaults as an attack against the honour and dignity of women and explicitly prohibited rape, enforced prostitution and any other forms of indecent aussaults.90 As the proceedings at the "International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia" and the "International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda" show, the war crime of sexual violence is still a problem current at the beginning of the 21st century. Both tribunals have punished rape as serious violation of the Geneva Conventions, breaches of the laws and customs of war and crimes against humanity.91 From the beginning of July 2002 sexual violence can be prosecuted as a crime against humanity and as a war crime by the International Criminal Court (ICC). The statute of the ICC prohibits sexual violence as a war crime in international as well as in internal conflicts and apart from rape lists sexual enslavement, enforced prostitution, forced pregnancy, enforced sterilization and any other forms of sexual violence as war crimes.92 This positive development in Schindler and Jiff Toman, eds., The Laws of Armed Conflicts. A Collection of Conventions, Resolutions and Other Documents, 2nd ed. (Geneva, 1981), pp. 3-23, here p. 10, article 44. See also Askin, War Crimes, pp. 29-36. "Abkommen betreffend die Gesetze und Gebräuche des Landkriegs. Vom 18. Oktober 1907", Reichsgesetzblatt 1(1910), pp. 107-51, article 46. "Commission on the Responsibility of the Authors of the War and the Enforcement of Penalties: Report presented to the Preliminary Peace Conference", American Journal ofInternational Law 14 (1920), pp. 95-154, here p. 114. See also Askin, War Crimes, pp. 42-45. Rhonda Copelon, "Surfacing Gender. Reengraving Crimes Against Women in Humanitarian Law", in Women and War in the Twentieth Century. Enlisted with or without Consent, ed. Nicole Ann Dombrowski (London, 1999), pp. 332-59, here p. 341. The Geneva Conventions and the additional protocols are printed in Schindler and Toman, eds., The Laws of Armed Conflicts, pp. 305-485, 551-629. See also Birgit Beck, "Massenvergewaltigungen als Kriegsverbrechen. Zur Entwicklung des Völkerrechtes", in Kriegsverbrechen im 20. Jahrhundert, eds. Wolfram Wette and Gerd R. Ueberschär (Darmstadt, 2001), pp. 406-18, here p. 413. See for

example the so-called "Foca-Trial" (IT-96-23): http://www.un.org./icty/; for Rwanda see the case of J. P. Akayesu (ICTR-96-4): http://www.ictr.org/. See http://www.un.org/law/icc/statute/romefra.htm; Regina Mühlhäuser, "Sexuelle Gewalt als Kriegsverbrechen: eine Herausforderung für die Internationale Strafgerichtsbarkeit", Mittelweg 36, 13 (2/2004), pp. 33-48, especially pp. 39-44.

182

international law will

Birgit Beck-Heppner

perhaps help historians to analyze sexual violence in war as both

present and future proceedings against perpetrators of such crimes will provide

new

sources.

Conclusion Summarizing this and bearing in mind the explanations at the beginning one has to admit that at present it is very difficult to assess the meaning of sexual violence in transcultural wars. The current state of research does not allow a general statement or thesis at the moment. To understand the historical meaning of sexual violence in war we have to analyze the aspects mentioned above in detail and to take into consideration further aspects in order to be able to compare it in various wars at various times. Although it seems that especially in transcultural wars the problem of racism and pejorative enemy images are responsible for the occurrence of sexual violence one cannot say that this war crime happens more in transcultural than in intracultural wars. A current example is the armed conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo93 which demonstrates that more empirical research on ethnic hatred and sexual violence is still needed. Further research is also needed on the problem of genocide and sexual violence. During the genocide in Rwanda in 1994 rape and other forms of sexual violence were an integral part of the crimes committed, but as a recently published article reveals "the subject is far from exhausted".94 Only if further empirical results for various wars and armed conflicts are available it will be possible to analyze the special impact of racist patterns in transcultural wars on the occurrence and the meaning of sexual violence.

Amnesty International, Mass rape. Timothy Longman, "Placing genocide in context: research priorities for the Rwandan genocide", Journal of Genocide Research 6/1 (2004), pp. 29-45, here p. 35.

V.

Concepts and Stereotypes of the Enemy and their Function

Hannes Möhring

The Christian Concept of the Muslim Enemy during the Crusades

What follows is an interim research report which should extensive portrayal with all the necessary references.1

shortly

be followed

by

an

From the wealth of literature on the Christian image of Muslims as enemies, the following works are named: Matthew Bennett, "The First Crusaders' Image of Muslims: The Influence of Vernacular Poetry?", Forum for Modern Language Studies 22 (1986), pp. 101-122; Jennifer Bray, "The Mohammetan and Idolatry", in Persecution and Toleration, ed. William J. Sheils, Studies in Church History 21 (Oxford, 1984), pp. 89-98; Norman Daniel, Islam and the West. The Making of an Image (Edinburgh, 1960, 2nd edition 1993); Norman Daniel, The Arabs and Medieval Europe (London, 1975, 2nd edition 1979); Aryeh Grabois, "La découverte du monde musulman par les pèlerins européens au XIIIe siècle", al-Masaq 5 (1992), pp. 29-46; David F. Graf and M. O'Connor, "The Origin of the Term Saracens and the Rawwafa Inscriptions", Byzantine Studies 4 (1977), pp. 52-66; Bernard Hamilton, "Knowing the Enemy: Western Understanding of Islam at the Time of the Crusades", Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Series 3,7 (1997), pp. 373-387; Peter Herde, "Christians and Saracens at the Time of the Crusades. Some Comments of Contemporary Medieval Canonists", Studia Gratiana 12 (1967), pp. 359-376; Rudolf Hiestand, "Der Kreuzfahrer und sein islamisches Gegenüber", in Das Ritterbild in Mittelalter und Renaissance, ed. Forschungsinstitut für Mittelalter und Renaissance, Studia Humaniora 1 (Düsseldorf, 1985), pp. 51-69; Rosalind Hill, "The Christian Views of the Muslims at the Time of the First Crusade", in The Eastern Mediterranean Lands in the Time of the Crusades, ed. Peter M. Holt (Warminster, 1977), pp. 1-19; Margaret Jubb, "Enemies in the Holy War, but Brothers in Chivalry: The Crusaders' View of their Saracen Opponents", in Aspects de l'épopée romane. Mentalités, Idéologies, Intertextualités, eds. Hans Van Dijk and Willem Noomen (Groningen, 1995), pp. 251-259; Benjamin Z. Kedar, Crusade and Mission. European Approaches toward Muslims (Princeton, 1984); Svetlana Luchitskaja, "L'image des musulmans dans les chroniques des croisades", Le Moyen Age 105 (1999), pp. 717-734; Hannes Möhring, "Der andere Islam. Zum Bild vom toleranten Sultan Saladin und neuen Propheten Schah Ismail", in Die Begegnung des Westens mit dem Osten, eds. Odilo Engels and Peter Schreiner (Sigmaringen, 1993), pp. 131-155; by the same author "Die Kreuzfahrer, ihre muslimischen Untertanen und die heiligen Stätten des Islam", in Toleranz im Mittelalter, eds. Alexander Patschovsky and Harald Zimmermann, Vorträge und Forschungen 45 (Sigmaringen, 1998), pp. 129-157; Ekkehart Rotter, Abendland und Sarazenen. Das okztdentale Araberbild und seine Entstehung im Frühmittelalter, Studien zur Sprache, Geschichte und Kultur des islamischen Orients, Neue Folge 11 (Berlin, 1986); Rüdiger Schnell, "Die Christen und die 'Anderen'. Mittelalterliche Positionen und germanistische Perspektiven", in

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I. The Muslim Opponent descriptions of Muslims in the Latin sources for the First Crusade do not differ significantly from the descriptions which occur in the sources from the period before the Crusades. They are negative and, above all, decisively religious. As enemies of the faith, Muslims were from the point of view of the western Christians, the enemies as such. In general they were called "Sar(r)aceni", "Agareni" or "Ismaelitae". In addition there is a wealth of other descriptions such as The

gentes (immundae), gentiles, pagani; -

-

-

-

infidèles, increduli, gens incredula, gens impia; inimici dei, inimici (crucis) Christi, hostes fidei et nominis christiani; filii falsitatis, filii diaboli, homines diabolici, viri Belial, satellites Antichristi; gens crudelis, tyranni, canes immundi, perfidi, gens nefaria, gens spreta.

-

originally a common description from the 2nd century onwards used by Byzantines for settled as well as nomadic Arabs. According to Hieronymus (died 419/420) it reflects the claim of the Arabs that they were descendands of Abraham's wife Sarah and not of Abraham or Sarah's servant Hagar. "Agareni" as a hint at the descent of the Arabs from the servant Hagar is consciously derogatory and probably takes up the description "Ismaelitae", whose twelve tribes are referred to in the Bible and who are regarded there as descendants of Ishmael, the son of Hagar fathered by Abraham (Gen. 25:12-18; 37:28; 39:1). In contrast to late antiquity, in the Middle Ages, the terms "Saraceni" and "Agareni" referred not only to Arabs but also to Muslims in general. Sometimes however in the Crusade sources individual peoples such as "Turci" are differentiated from the "Saraceni", so that in these cases "Saraceni" appears to stand for "Arabs". It is noticeable that in the 12th and 13th centuries, academic treatises and their Muslim authors were more often described by their Latin translators not as Saracenes but as Arabs: they write, for example, about the opinions of the Arabs, about Arab teachers and about the treasures of the Arabs. "Syri" or "Suriani" on the other hand does not refer to Syrians in general or to Syrian Muslims, but exclusively to Melkite Christians. "Saraceni" and "Agareni" could also stand for non-Muslims: in the 11th century the Normans were called "Agareni" in the Annales Romani; likewise, Benzo of Alba attempted to disparage the Norman Robert Guiscard by calling him "Agarenus". In the 12th century, on the occasion of the Emperor Henry V's French campaign in 1124, Suger of St. Denis slandered even the Germans as "Saraceni". In the 13th century Roger Bacon likewise described the heathen in Prussia who were being fought by the German "Saraceni" is Romans and

Begegnung des Westens mit dem Osten, eds. Odilo Engels and Peter Schreiner (Sigmaringen, 1994), pp. 185-202; Rainer C. Schwinges, Kreuzzugsideologie und Toleranz. Studien zu Wilhelm von Tyrus, Monographien zur Geschichte des Mittelalters 15 (Stuttgart, 1977); John V. Tolan, Saracens. Islam in the Medieval European Imagination (New York, 2002).

Die

The Christian

Concept of the Muslim Enemy during the Crusades

187

Saracenes and in the two centuries which followed, even Lithuanians could be meant by the term as the travel descriptions by Jean de Mandeville and Ghillebert de Lannoy demonstrate. Muslims and Saracenes were partly designated as unclean people or unclean dogs, but the epitome of the unclean people were the peoples Gog and Magog, expected at the end of time, under whom, for instance, cannibalism was supposed to be widespread. order

as

II. The Islamic

Religion

as "perniciosus", "pravus" and the Muslims as seduced), "subversor", "barat(h)rus" (and thereby "Antichristus" Sathanae" and (in the apocalyptic "pseudopropheta", "primogenitus sense). Sometimes Muhammad is regarded as God of the Muslims. The Islamic Religion appears in the Crusade sources without deeper knowledge as "doctrina pestilens"; "dogma pestiferum", "dogma perversum", "impietas", "falsitas", "error" and "superstitio". In contrast to Christendom as religion of love, Islam is seen as religion of the sword and violence. It is indeed not claimed that the Muslims' aim was to convert Christians to Islam by force, although Pope Urban II in his call to the Crusade on 27th November, 1095 painted the alleged oppression of the Christian churches in the east in glowing colours. The Muslims were described as enemies of Christ but not as persecutors of Christians; this would have been in keeping with the Christian polemic against heathens in late antiquity. Just as in the Arabic sources there are references to the profaning of Islamic mosques by Christians, so now and then is the opposite, the profaning of Christian churches, referred to in the Latin sources. In the 13 th and 14th centuries there are reports of Christian preachers who were executed by Muslims according to Islamic law; by abusing Muslims and the Islamic religion, they often appear to have practically sought a martyr's death. The Latin sources have in this matter mainly stuck to the facts, because on the Muslim side the principle of the Koran, Sura 2,256, applied, although it was to a great extent concealed by the Christian side: "There is no compulsion in religion". The domination or conquest of the Christians was the aim of the Muslims, but not their conversion to Islam. Proper persecution of Christians can first be observed in Egypt in the late Middle Ages under Mamluk rule. In view of the image of Islam as a religion of unbridled violence is this distinction however only of slight significance. In line with charges of heathendom and superstition, the Muslims were accused of idolatry and polytheism. In view of the opposition to images and the strict monotheism of Islam which allows Muslims to charge Christians with polytheism because of the belief in the trinity, this is practically grotesque. First of all, on the Christian side, people wanted to see what was wrong with the Islamic religion. It is true that some

Muhammad, the prophet of Islam, is described and

-

as

"seductor"

Hannes Möhring

188

things which Christendom and Islam had in common were recognized (and that is why Islam was partly also regarded as a Christian heresy, cf. below), but compared to the differences they were not regarded as decisive in view of the judgment of Islam. The emphasis in both religions was on the deviding rather than the connecting elements, and Christians and Christendom were emphatically distinguished from Muslims and Islam.

III.

Change in the Concept of the Enemy

The Christian concept of the Muslim as enemy began to change to some extent even before the Crusade states were forced onto the military defensive by their Muslim neighbours and before it became plain that Muslims could not be decisively beaten and Islam could not be destroyed. It appears that despite the religious contrast, political requirements and pragmatic considerations have influenced the concept of the enemy and not the other way round: that the concept of the enemy influenced politics. The concept of the enemy partly changed in the light of changed politics. Because of the closeness to the enemy of the faith and the formation of an own identity by the Crusade states, for which Fulcher of Chartres provides the best example, a greatly weakened, to some extent even a positive concept of enemy emerged. This however spread only gradually throughout Europe and the original dominating concept of Muslim as enemy could never be completely suppressed. Bases for a less negative judgment of the Muslim opponents can be observed as early as in the historical sources of the First Crusade. The authors recognize to some extent the bravery of the Turks and at the same time regret that they are not Christians. The approach is also shown in that it is sometimes maintained that Turks, like the Franks, were descendants of the Trojans: Franks and Turks would therefore have had the same ancestors.

Fulcher of Chartres' Ffistoria Hierosolymitana shows a distinct change in the judgment of the opponent. A participant in the First Crusade who did not return to Europe but remained in the Holy Land, Fulcher wrote a great deal as an eye witness or with access to relevant sources. The original edition of his work covered the period up to 1124. Afterwards, that is following around 25 years' stay in the Holy Land, he revised it and continued it up to 1127. A comparison of the two editions allows important conclusions to be drawn. The growing readiness to coexist arising from everyday meeting with Muslim counterparts is quite unmistakable in Fulcher. Thus in the second edition, he removed in some places the hostile attributes applied to Muslims. They are no longer described as "pagani" or "perfidi". Referring to the Battle of Jaffa in 1102, he no longer refers to the Egyptians as "impii", but as "inimici"; and he no longer classes them with the heathen, because he replaces the expression "gens nefanda

The Christian

Concept of the Muslim Enemy during the Crusades

189

gentilium" with "gens nefaria". Correspondingly, the Crusaders no longer go into action against the Egyptians as "Christiani", but as "gens nostra". An unmistakable change in attitude towards the Muslims can also be observed in the chronicle which the chancellor of the kingdom of Jerusalem, Archbishop William of

12th century. Unlike Fulcher of Chartres, William born in the Holy Land but he studied in Europe and returned to the kingdom of Jerusalem. The picture of Muhammad and Islam drawn by William does not differ substantially from that of the earlier Latin sources which originated in the west. For William, Muhammad was not the God of the Muslims, but he did regard him as a seductor (seductor) and the religion preached by Muhammad was regarded by William as error (error) and superstition (superstitio). Muhammad must have been possessed by madness (insania) to call himself prophet in a fraudulent way; he presumed to claim that he was sent by God. As "dogma pestiferum", "dogma perversum" and "doctrina pestilens", in William's eyes, Islam was a false doctrine which brought min. William recognized the dastardliness of the heresy far more in the leaders of Islam than in Muslims in general. He was not alone in this weighting of apportioning guilt, because Christian authors who lived before and after him likewise ascribed less of an active participation in the rise of Islam to the Arabs in gerenal but blamed the false prophets alone for leading their coreligionists astray. William sees the fast spread of the Islamic religion as being due to the use of force. William's of Tyre change in attitude towards Muslims is shown in the fact that he never refers to followers of Islam as "pagani", although the authors of his sources on the First Crusade and the two decades following the conquest of Syria and Palestine still follow the traditional concept of heathen. The term "pagani" occurs in William of Tyre only in two documents which he quotes word for word. Muhammad was in William's eyes not an idol and Islam was not idolatry. Instead of "pagani", heathen, William of Tyre calls the Muslims "infidèles", unbelievers. In one case William of Tyre describes a Muslim ruler as exemplary his at who died in 1174 the of his mler of as contemporary Nuraddin, peak power Aleppo, Damascus and Egypt. On the occasion of his death, it is true that William described him as "maximus nominis et fidei Christianae persecutor", but also as "princeps tarnen justus" and as "secundum gentis suae traditiones religiosus", having already called him "felix" and "juxta traditiones illius populi superstitiosas, timens Deum". William of Tyre is convinced that his God is the same as that of Nuraddin, for according to William, Nuraddin did not merely worship "suum Deum", but "Deum", even if the form of his worship is not the same as that of the Christian tradition. Fear of God is one of the most respected qualifications for a religious person. The characterization of Nuraddin by William of Tyre echoes Peter's word in the Acts of the Apostles, 10:35, that God is welcome in any nation which fears him and does what is right. The Tyre,

wrote in the second half of the

was

-

190

Hannes Möhring

adjectives used by William of Tyre to refer to Nuraddin generally embelish only a pious Christian ruler who fulfils his duty to govern in Christian responsibility. William makes a very clear distinction here between Nuraddin and his father, Zengi, whom William describes as "sceleratus", "crudelissimus" and "saevissimus", and makes a positive contrast, too, with his successor, Saladin, whom William characterizes as able, but an usurper and tyrant mied by arrogance and thirst for glory. It is noticeable that when William of Tyre praises Nuraddin it is not as a Shiite, but as a pioneer of the Sunnite orthodoxy, even though William distinguishes between Sunnite and Shiite Muslims and writes that the Shiite form of Islam is closer to Christianity than the Sunnite. Archbishop William of Tyre and the Archbishop of Toledo who died 60 years after him, Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada (d. 1247), are the only Latin scholars who wrote an independent history of Muslims in the time of the Crusades. In doing so they threw out the old principle which, for instance, was still followed by William's older contemporary, Bishop Otto of Freising (d. 1158): The "civitas perfida", the unbelieving Jews and Heathen, show scarcely any deeds worth mentioning and which should be passed on to future generations. Unfortunately, William's work on Islamic history has not been preserved. In the west, a change of this sort cannot at first be observed. On the contrary: at the beginning of the Second Crusade, Bernhard of Clairvaux demanded that all heathens either be converted to Christianity or killed. Because the Second Cmsade was accompanied by a series of heavy military defeats, there was no opportunity to put Bernhard's demands into practice and, after the failure of the Second Crusade, many Christians blamed Bernhard for the failure. For the first time fundamental criticism of the Cmsade concept was voiced which partly was regarded as a tool of the devil. The change in the concept of the Muslim enemy took place in the west with the rise of the concept of the "noble heathen", of which Sultan Saladin was the definitive example: Saladin granted the Christian capitulators safe conduct from Jerusalem in 1187, kept his word and, in the course of the Third Cmsade, likewise showed himself to be a chivalrous opponent of the Crusaders. Of course the old concept of enemy continued to exist. The "noble heathen" was sometimes regarded as a secret Christian and typically, too, Saladin and some other Muslim rulers were regarded as Muslim exceptions who changed nothing in the concept of Islam. For the attitude of western Christians to Muslims and Islam, the case of Ricoldo de Monte Croce at the end of the 13th century seems typical: in Ricoldo's report on his stay in Mesopotamia, a veritable hymn on the morality of Muslims is followed by a characterization of the Koran filled with violent aversion. The abrupt contasts in the judgment of persons and teaching sit uneasily beside each other. In the reports from the late Middle Ages by Christian pilgrims to Jerusalem, despite their own experience, nothing changed in their judgment of the Muslims.

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Concept of the Muslim Enemy during the Crusades

191

In the west, the concept of the Islamic religion changed little, despite the translation of the Koran. The contradictions of some statements in the Koran were recognized but interpreted to Islam's disadvantage, although the Islamic mlers could bear different traits and did so. Thus there was little awareness of the sentence in the Koran, Sura 2:256, "There is no compulsion in religion" or at least no emphasis put on it; instead the opposite statements which could also be found in the Koran were held to be decisive even though this principle, despite the relevant regulations in canon law, had never once been fully carried out even on the Christian side: in contrast to Islam, a conversion, once carried out, even under force, was irrevocable because of the sacrament of baptism. This was, for example, made plain by the behaviour of the antipope, Clement III regarding the forced conversion of the Jews at the beginning of the First Cmsade in 1096. However the evaluation of Islam changed somewhat in the 12th century in that, whereas one had previously called the Islamic religion "error" and "falsitas" (e.g. by Guibert of Nogent), now it was regarded partly as heresy, i.e. as a distortion of Christianity and therefore countered the charge of the Muslims that Judaism and Christianity had distorted the true religion. The Muslims themselves were hardly ever described as heretics (but at least by Petms Venerabilis). The charge of heresy was made centuries before the First Cmsade by the Byzantines and reached the Latinspeaking West thanks to the papal librarian Anastasius' Latin translation of Theophanes' world chronicle; however, despite the popularity of the world chronicle, little attention was paid to it. That changed only when the West began to study Islam -

independently. According to Petms Venerabilis (d. 1156), the founder of Islamic studies in the west, the Islamic religion and its followers could be equally well described as heathenish or heretical, although he correctly established that, according to church law, Islam did not start from the church, and therefore could not be heresy in the strict sense of the word. The denial of Christ's suffering and death point towards heresy; the rejection of baptism and the Eucharistie sacrifice, as well as derision of confession and all the other church sacraments point towards heathenism. Accordingly, Petms Venerabilis used the general term "error" to describe Islam, but occasionally he also used "haeresis" and "secta Saracenorum". He recognized that Muslims believed in one God, but did not wish to share God with them, because the Saracenes would confess God in words (in their confession of faith "There is no other God but God, and Muhammad is the ambassador of God") without really knowing him. It was only from the beginning of the 13 th century onwards that clear statements which call Islam a heresy and recognize a common God for Christians and Muslims appear in the western Latin sources. This applies to the Cmsade chronicler Oliver of Paderborn (d. 1227) who knew Egypt and Palestine from his own experience by participating in the Fifth Cmsade; after the defeat of Acre, he tried to convert the Egyptian Sultan Al-Kamil to Christianity by letter. On the other hand, William of

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Tripoli (d. after 1273), who was most likely bom in Syrian Tripoli, recognized, not least for missionary purposes, not only that Christians and Muslims worshipped the same God but that Muslims were close to Christian belief and the path to salvation. In this conntext, it must also be emphasized that the Crusades in the orient were never propagated by the popes as crusades against heresy, although some canonists justified the Crusades with the argument that Islam was an apostasy, a break from right belief. Apart from that, none of the popes ever declared the conversion of Muslims as an aim of the Crusades in any of the calls to Crusade, although a man such as Gregory IX, on 4th March, 1238, promised the Dominican and Fransiscan missionaries in the Holy Land the same indulgence as the Crusaders who were fighting by force of arms.

IV. Effects of the

Concept of Enemy

European Christians to decide to take up the cross and fight against Muslims in the orient, the concept of enemy was less decisive in the First Crusade than the papal promise of remission of sins and the aim of conquering Jerusalem. Material gain was also a motive over and above this i.e. booty and conquest. In the example of the For

-

launch of the First Crusade, it is clear that stereotypes and concepts of enemy are not the only motivation triggering action. Their function is less in triggering than in accompanying the action. The development of the Christian concept of Muslim as enemy may have had the basic aim, among others, of strengthening the identity of European Christendom; however it is hardly ascertainable whether, or to what extent, this was actually the case during the 12th and 13th centuries. Perhaps it amounted to nothing more than distinguishing Christians from Muslims. In any case, the idea of the Crusades and the negative concept of Muslims were effective in not being able to stop the harmful rivalries and struggles among the European Christians in the course of the Crusades both in the time between the Crusades and during the Crusades themselves. The clashes between the English and French kings and between empire and papacy highlight this. Apart from this, it can be noted that negative rather than positive changes emerged during the Crusades in the attitude of western Christians towards the Christians of the Orient, whom they regarded as heretics (i.e. Monophysites and Nestorians). However Urban II in the first ever papal call to Crusade in 1095 had called for the liberation of the Christian churches of the Orient who were being oppressed by Muslims. The relationship to the Byzantine fellow Christians deteriorated dramatically as a result of the Crusades a development which already became apparent after the First Crusade, although, in fact, it was launched by a call for help from the Byzantine emperor. The aim of the Christian concept of the Muslim as enemy to legitimize the Crusaders' use of violence is evident; however it is not determinable whether the -

-

The Christian

193

Concept of the Muslim Enemy during the Crusades

a major part in encouraging the Christians in their use of is the violence. If this case, it can only be assumed for the 50 years from the First Crusade to the Second Cmsade, because when it failed in the middle of the 12' century, it launched a discussion about the point of a Cmsade in the Orient and, a few decades later, discussions began to rise about the question of whether it was allowed to kill a Muslim. Despite the massacre of the local population by the Cmsaders in 1099 and in the years afterwards in the conquest of Jerusalem and other cities in the Holy Land, the Christians did not intent to annihilate or eradicate the Muslim opponents completely. It is tme that mosques were turned into churches but no relics of the other religion were destroyed. Thus, Mecca was never a war target for the Cmsaders, and they also never attacked the caravans of pilgrims to Mecca, although the Muslims feared this on a number of occasions. The Christian concept of the Muslim as enemy never led to an attempt at permanent military aggression. After the end of the First Cmsade and founding of the Crusader states, it scarcely determined politics at least not decisively. For example, the Second Cmsade was caused by the loss of Edessa, the capital of the oldest Crusader state; and the Third Cmsade, despite several prior Cmsading vows by the kings of England and France, was only provoked by the loss of Jerusalem. Even the ban by the popes on selling Muslims weapons and other things which could be used in battle against the Christians was to a great extent ineffective. In any case, soon after the foundation of the Cmsader states, not only were contracts made, but even alliances between Cmsaders and Muslim rulers, which were sometimes directed against other Christians and Cmsader states. To overcome conflict, condominium was used the shared rule of a particular area with Christians and Muslims as equal partners. In the Cmsader states there was no persecution of Jews or Muslims, and even mosques existed at least in the harbour town of Tyre and in Nablus. Perhaps it is no coincidence that only the Arabic sources mention their existence, while the Latin sources remain silent on the matter.

concept of enemy played

-

-

-

Michael Hochgeschwender

Enemy Images in the American Civil War A Case Study on Their Function in a Modern Society -

I. Contemporary research on enemy images, i.e. socially constructed and highly negatively stereotyped pictures of the "other" with virtually no or only very limited reference to this "other's" reality1, has for a rather long time primarily been done by social and political scientists2, by neurologists, psychologists or psychoanalysts3, and by anthropologists. Besides, the analysis of stereotypes became an important aspect of gender theories.4 Their main common aim and dominant theme was to clarify in how far enemy images and stereotypes were responsible for aggressive behaviour among individuals, peer groups or even nations. Thus, this research dealt with the practical problems and immediate results of aggressive actions on every level, and it, moreover,

2

4

This definition is generally based on an "objectivist" standpoint with regard to a given reality. Within a cultural relativist or perspectivist framework enemy images would just signify but one species of the genus "stereotypes", while further prescriptive notions would be problematic. At least, it would lack any solid conceptual legitimation. For further interpretations see Günther Wagenlehner, "Einleitung", in Feindbild: Geschichte, Dokumentation, Problematik, ed. Günther Wagenlehner (Frankfurt/Main, 1989), pp. 6-11. Furthermore cf. Josef Berghold, Feindbilder und Verständigung: Grundfragen der politischen Psychologie (Opladen, 2002) or Karin Liebhardt, Fremdbilder-Feindbilder-Zerrbilder: Zur Wahrnehmung und diskursiven Konstruktion des Fremden (Klagenfurt, 2002). For literature on stereotyping see Michael Pickering, Stereotyping: The Problem of Representation (Basingstoke, 2001); Frederick F. Schauer, Profiles, Probabilities and Stereotypes (Cambridge, 2003). Cf. Joan Nordquist, Gender and Racial Images/ Stereotypes in the Mass Media: A Bibliography (Santa Cruz, 2001); William L. Chew, Stereotypes in Perspective: Americans in France, Frenchmen in America (Amsterdam, 2001). Steven J. Cooper, Neurobiology ofStereotyped Behaviour (Oxford, 1990). William B. Swann, Sexism and Stereotypes in Modern Societies: The Gender Science of Janet Taylor Spence (Washington, 1999); Samuel L. Gilman, Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness (Ithaca, 1981).

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tried to

figure out, whether or not it was possible to overcome the social deficiencies of negatively stereotyping potential enemies and social outcasts. Due to these beginnings, the early research on enemy images tended to be rather normative and in a certain way presentist. During the three decades from the 1960s to the 1990s it predominantly focussed on charting the actual functions of enemy images and on morally denouncing them. Research on enemy images and negative stereotyping always had a clear political and pedagogical message. This one-sided approach was decontextualized and to some degree ahistorical. As most of these generally valuable studies were done by sociologists and political scientists, the filed of empirical research with a historical scope is still limited. The theoretical basis of the traditional approach was contaminated by its pedagogical impact.5 Therefore, we still miss sound studies on the historical longterm effects of basic modes of stereotypizing ethnically, religiously, racially, or socially differing groups.6 On an even more basic level, we still are not really aware of the intrinsic relation between these long-term processes and their short-term use as instmments of national or social cohesion during the time of war and other conflicts. There has been but one field of intensified historical analysis of enemy images: racism, and more specifically the history of antijudaism and anti-Semitism.7 Only recently, somehow influenced by the impact of the so-called cultural mm, did historians start to change their attitudes. They became aware of the necessity to broaden 5

6

7

Cf. Georg E. Becker, Pädagogik gegen Fremdenfeindlichkeit, Rassismus und Gewalt: Mut und Engagement in der Schule (Weinheim, 1994); Aaron D. Grehon, America's Atonement: Racial Pain, Recovery Rhetoric, and the Pedagogy ofHealing (New York, 2002). Some possible exceptions are Frank Bosbach, Feindbilder: Die Darstellung des Gegners In der politischen Publizistik des Mittelalters und der Neuzeit (Köln, 1999); Christoph Jahr, Feindbilder in der deutschen Geschichte: Studien zur Vorurteilsgeschichte im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Berlin, 1994). Cf. for instance Wolfgang Benz und Werner Bergmann, Vorurteil und Völkermord: Entwicklungslinien des Antisemitismus (Freiburg/Br, 1997); Bernd Marin, Antisemitismus ohne Antisemiten: Autoritäres Vorurteil und Feindbild (Frankfurt/Main, 2002); from the perspective of literature see as well Ursula Schulze, Juden In der deutschen Literatur: Religiöse Konzepte-FeindbilderRechtfertigungen (Tübingen, 2002). Anti-Semitism has also been a starting point for the history of enemy images in the U.S., the other ones were anti-Catholicism and (anti-black) racism, cf. Leonard Dinnerstein, Antisemitism in America (New York, 1994); Joseph W. Bendersky, The "Jewish Threat": Anti-Semitic Politics in the U.S. Army (New York, 2000); Jody M. Roy, Rhetorical Campaigns of the Nineteenth-Century Anti-Catholics and Catholics in America (Lewiston, 2000); Carol A. Horton, Race and the Making of American Liberalism (New York, 2005); Eric T.L. Love, Race over Empire: Racism and U.S. Imperialism (Chapel Hill, 2004); more general accounts are Immanuel Geiss, Geschichte des Rassismus (Frankfurt/Main, 1988) and George L. Mosse, Die Geschichte des Rassismus in Europa (Frankfurt/Main, 1994). David Brion Davis as early as 1960 often argued for a more functionalist approach in the history of enemy images, see for example David Brion Davis, "Some Themes of Counter-Subversion: An Analysis of Anti-Masonic, anti-Catholic, and anti-Mormon Literature", in Mississippi Valley Historical Review 47:2 (1960), pp. 202-39 and "Some Ideological Functions of Prejudice in Ante-Bellum America", in American Quarterly 15:2 (1963), pp. 98-123.

197

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the agenda of historiography. Some of the "soft" factors within the broader range of historical interpretation, such as socially or culturally constructed modes of perception or perceptional biases, were assessed more valuable than ever before.8 Especially the quest for the relation between inclusive and exclusive elements in the ideology of national integration became more interesting than in the 1960s or 1970s. Due to the rise of multiculturalism and the notorious debate on political correctness, pedagogic approaches again for some time dominated the field.9 Among historians, themes from the 20th century, such as, for example, Cold War perceptions between Americans and Russians, mutual racist perceptions of Americans and Japanese during World War II, anti-Americanism et cetera were examined. With the exception of racism and antiCatholicism in the US and the enemy images during the German wars of unification,10 the research on enemy images was deeply embedded into actual and contemporary history. Only recently, the nineteenth century received more attention. However, the historical analysis of enemy images is still in the beginning. Therefore, as Ragnhild Fiebig-von Hase has thoroughly shown in her sound and impressive introduction into a collection of essays on enemy images11, the main topics of research among historians are still defined by the methodological and epistemic interests of the social sciences. Thus, enemy images were properly scrutinized under the premises of individual or group psychology or according to the rules of a sociological functionalism. Yet, as a paradoxical result of this dependence on certain scientific epistemologies, some major problems still remain, The most important may be as Christopher Weiler pointed out in his illuminating review article that we still miss a coherent theory of enemy images as well in the social sciences as in historiography. Prima facie, this is quite surprising, if we take into account the general theoretical interest of the social sciences. Moreover, even inside social sciences the practical interest has been declining for more than a decade. According to Weiler this is perhaps a result of the political agenda of stereotype research among social scientists: -

,

-

Der hohen politischen Relevanz des Phänomens steht eine überraschend geringe sozialwissenschaftliche Aufmerksamkeit für Feindbilder gegenüber. In keiner der einschlägigen Disziplinen (Politikwissenschaft, Soziologie, Psychologie) läßt sich der emsthafte Versuch erkennen, in theorieorientierter Weise den Begriff 'Feindbild' zu konzeptualisieren und ihn für die Beschreibung oder gar Erklärung von Einstellungen, Konfliktverhalten oder Wirklichkeitsbildem 8

Cf. Allison Graham, Hollywood, Television, and Race during the Civil Rights Struggle (Baltimore, 2001); Allan R. Pred, The Past is not Dead: Facts, Fictions, and Enduring Racial Stereotypes

(Minneapolis, 2004). Epifanio San Juan, Racism and Cultural Studies: Critiques of Multiculturalism, Ideology, and the Politics of Difference (Durham, 2002); Michael Keith, After the Cosmopolitan? Multicultural Cities and the Future ofRacism (London, 2004). 0 Cf. for instance Michael Jeismann, Das Vaterland der Feinde: Studien zum nationalen Feindbegriff und Selbstverständnis in Deutschland und Frankreich, 1792-1918 (Stuttgart, 1992). Ragnhild Fiebig-von Hase, "Introduction", in Enemy Images in American History, ed. Ragnhild Fiebig-von Hase (Providence, 1997), pp. 1-41.

9

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198

nutzen. (...) Für die wissenschaftliche Analyse von Konflikten und der ihnen zugrundeliegenden Vorstellungen über die jeweils andere Konfliktpartei scheint der Begriff 'Feindbild' offensichtlich verzichtbar.12 zu

be frustrating enough, yet Weller's article forces us to another problematic insight: The theoretical research on enemy images has seemingly been too much inclined to a moralistic, presentist standpoint, that became virtually obsolete with the end of the Cold War as Sitz im Leben of the whole project. The mutually antagonistic perceptions of the Cold War situation were the firm basis of every attempt to gain insights into the practical function of enemy images. It, however, proved to be at least not very helpful in establishing an adequate conceptual framework for the whole analysis. Too much was taken for granted and, consequently, too many results were theoretically flawed. Even the outbreak of new clashes along cultural lines after September 11th, 2001 does not seem to reintroduce a major theoretical interest in enemy images at least in social sciences. While the results of the social scientist's debates about a theory of enemy images are still under discussion and therefore of only limited value for the historical research, there seems to be at least one basic assumption that has eminent relevance for our task: Among the protagonists of the whole discussion there is a certain consensus about the idea, that enemy images are performed and function in a specific form within the broader framework of modernity. The enemy images that are predominantly analysed are images based on the iconic and semantic repertoire of complex modem industrial societies.13 This does in no way include the idea of a pre-modem era completely free from any stereotyped pictures and perceptions of difference. As far as we can see it, the negative stereotype of the "other" and of "otherness", the negative image of difference in comparison with homogeneity and unity, seem to be rather universal.14 However, the sociological as well as the historical research epitomize constantly the utter necessity of enemy images in modem societies, i.e. societies without any or with a reduced traditional way of self-legitimization. The underlying tacit assumption of this premise This conclusion

12

13

14

seems

to

Christoph Weller, "Feindbilder: Ansätze und Probleme ihrer Erforschung", in Institut für Interkulturelle und Internationale Studien Arbeitspapiere 22 (2001), pp. 1-66, here p. 3. The key concept of modernity is notoriously vague. Anyway, the modernization theories in their more elaborate versions still provide us with a coherent and causal narrative of social processes within urban, industrialized and mass-participatory nation states of the 19th and 20th century. Cf. Wolfgang Zapf, Modernisierung und Modernisierungstheorien (Berlin, 1990); Peter Wehling, Die Moderne als Sozialmythos: Zur Kritik sozialwissenschaftlicher Modernisierungstheorien (Frankfurt/Main, 1996); Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Modernisierungstheorie und Geschichte (Göttingen, -

1975). this does not include the argument of any form of anthropological universal. Moreover, from an ethnological or anthropological perspective one has to add the contradictory phenomenon of hospitality toward the needy foreigner and the holiness of the guest in pre-modem societies. This leads to the conclusion, that we may have to reckon with a dialectic of hostility and hospitability in pre-modem societies. Yet, the fact remains, that they tend to prefer a homogeneous self-image over the troublesome burdens of disunity.

Again,

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199

lies in the idea, that the fragmentations and segmentations of developed, modem industrial society with their competing upward and downward forms of mobility, undermine traditional means of social cohesion. They are supposed to be in need for an integrative and cohesive impetus, as they lack the strength of tradition, customs, ritual, religion, and dynastic legitimacy. Moreover, the self-reflexive character of the enlightened project of modernity matter of factly seems to actively exclude any nonreflexive mode of cohesion. But tradition is always in danger to lose its determining impact in the moment it turns into a reflected tradition. Thus, a fragmented, virtually disintegrated modem society requires different means of social integration. Strong stereotyped enemy images may perhaps be thought of as an useful solution. This may be the more true, as war the most powerful cause for constructing enemy images was all through the 18th, 19th, and 20th century intricately intertwined with the process of building the modem nation state.15 Furtheron, the structurally fragmentating impacts of race, gender, and especially within a capitalist society class made it even more necessary to search for effective modes of integration. The modem, theoretically informed, historical research on the becoming of the nation states and on the relations between nation states and war habits has therefore significantly shown the specific value of enemy images in these processes.16 Herein, the "other", the "enemy", serves as a negative reference point for the own integrated identity and therefore as an important element of national integration ex negativo. This potential cohesive force of enemy images add a functional element to their mere existence and may explain, why they are so powerful and long-lasting. The history of modem propaganda may serve as a sufficient prove for this thesis.17 During the later 19th and early 20th century the cohesive effect of enemy images was even intensified. As a result of a combination of post-Cartesian and enlightened beliefs in natural sciences on the one hand and the organic belief system of romanticism on the other hand, the ideas of the "other" and of "difference" stiffened. The over-all standpoint of the "other" was devalued, the "other" more and more dehumanised. This development did not only evolve in matters of race, such as, for instance, anti-Semitism or the attitudes toward Negroes or Asians in the United States.18 Differences in class or gender were handled less flexible as well. The -

-

-

15

16

17

18

-

example Horst Carl et al., eds., Kriegsniederlagen: Erfahrungen und Erinnerungen (Berlin, 2004); Dietrich Beyrau, ed., Der Krieg in religiösen und nationalen Deutungen der Neuzeit (Tübingen, 2001). Martin van Crefeld, The Rise and Decline of the State (Cambridge, 1999); Wolfgang Reinhard, Geschichte der Staatsgewalt (München, 2000); Wolfgang Knöbl, Die Gegenwart des Krieges: Staatliche Gewalt in der Moderne (Frankfurt/Main, 2000). Cf. for

Cf. Michael Hochgeschwender, '"Union und Konstitution': Die Erfindung der USA im Spiegel modemer Propgandatheorien", in Propaganda-Selbstdarstellung-Repräsentation im römischen Kaiserreich des L Jahrhunderts n. Chi; eds. Gregor Weber and Martin Zimmermann (Stuttgart, 2003), pp. 103-26. David R. Roediger, Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class

(London, 1991).

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lucid fluency of older concepts was gone. Based on a more functionalist view, these hard concepts ably served as a basis for integrationist national, racial, or social ideologies. Thus, they are a valiant starting point for analysis. At this point, nonetheless, another methodological problem arises. It derives from current debates on the theory of propaganda.19 As enemy images are according to the classical modernist standpoint of a critique of ideology as triggered by Karl Marx, Max Weber, or Karl Mannheim a result manipulative techniques actually used by the ruling classes and elites, the functionalist theory of enemy images is based on behaviourist and critically realist psychologies and noetics. Both are essential for a broader unified theory of enemy images and its social function. Only if there is something like an intelligible, tme reality, a critique of manipulation seems to make sense. Even more important is a tendency toward theoretical models based on a topdown agency. Identity politics and image-making, then, are manipulative processes derived from the interests of ruling elites.20 Culturalist theoreticians on the other hand critizise this top-down approach as one-sided, simplistic, and based on an outdated model of epistemology. Their rivalling argument is based on three basic assumptions -

-

respectively objections: First, the top-down model

"making" enemy images by manipulating the justification the lower, non-elitist classes from their social responsibilities in the body politic. As influential and powerful as manipulative propaganda techniques may be, they cannot work without any sort of Folgebereitschaft. Thus, we not only have to ask for the mling classes' interests when dealing with the transfer of enemy images into the masses. We additionally have to ask for the mythopoietic power and for the interests of this very mass in its fragmentary state as well. To frame it a little bit differently: What about enemy images and negative stereotypes among and from the majority of the peasants, the working-class, or the petty-bourgoisie? Are they only a product of outside influences or do they adequately reflect the social interests and strategies of the mass? Of special importance for the analysis of these questions are party affiliations, cultural and denominational traditions, of actively

mass, releases without further

and socio-economic status. Secondly, we thus have to reckon with long-term stereotypes or even the spontaneous framing of enemy images from the lower classes themselves in a sort of bottom-up approach. This has to be included into a theory of propaganda, manipulation, and the functioning of enemy images. Perhaps, enmification is much less a rational act then we tend to believe. Predominantly in times of war, there may be unplanned, spontaneous activities within or without the established order of things. Perhaps they can be transferred easily into the ongoing propaganda activities of the mling elite. But 19

20

Cf. Wolfgang Schieder and Christof Dipper, "Propaganda", in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, 5, eds. Otto Brunner, Werner Conze and Reinhart Koselleck (Stuttgart, 1984), pp. 69-112. This point of view is very radically presented by Lutz Niethammer, Kollektive Identität: Heimliche Quellen einer unheimlichen Konjunktur (Hamburg, 2000).

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also have to reckon with fundamental dysfunctionalities of propagandistic enmification within a more particularist, dialectical framework of top-down and bottom-up stereotyping. The internal fragmentations of modem industrial societies with their partisan organization tend to preserve their ability to perform the social modes of stereotyped perceptions. The more open a society is, the more problematic any attempt to monopolize processes of stereotyping will be. But even in authoritarian and totalitarian societies, there is no proven case a total loss of bottom-up agency.21 Thirdly, and this point is a corollary to the two earlier arguments, the classical approach is maybe much too optimistic about the influence and the functionality of the cohesive force of enemy images within a given, fragmented society. If modem societies are as fragmented as we analyze them, and if the chances of participating in relatively open discourses are as open as we tend to regard them, and, finally, if there is any sort of self-regulating, spontaneous bottom-up agency, the mere possibility of a dysfunctional use of enemy images or even the total failure of any enmification must be quite high. It is not really imaginable that all parts of a given society react in the same way toward the usage of specific enemy images. Thus, the effects of enmification depend on the intelligibility of different enemy images within the intellectual, cultural, behavioural, social, and emotional framework of a specific social setting. Therefore, the agency of enemy images depends in a dialectical manner of as well the intentions of the elites as of the fragmented masses. In my case study, I will present an important example of this dialectics of functionalism and dysfunctionalism. we

II. The Civil War in the United States of America from 1861 to 1865 many people in the former Confederacy still prefer the notions of "War between the States" or "War of Northern Aggression" (a case of post-war enmification of its own) may serve as a good example to show how intricate the relations between intended enemy images and their perception among the different social groups can be. It involved a highly modern, industrial and well fragmented society, at least in the Northern part of the broken Union, on which I will limit my scope. Starting at least with the 1840s, within the US differing interests of urban and agrarian middle-class evangelicals and liberals in the Whig and Republican parties collided with the opposing viewpoints of upper class and working class Democrats from both, the South and the North, many of them German or Irish immigrants of Roman Catholic stock. During the war these conflicts became even more fragmented, as the Democrats split into War and Peace Democrats. Moreover did sectional lines shape the political dispute. The Civil War showed that the Northern Union was much more in danger of splitting apart than the more unified Southern -

-

21

Cf. For example Ian Kershaw, Der Hitler-Mythos: Führerkult und

Volksmeinung (Stuttgart, 1997).

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Confederacy. Thus, the eminently politized American society of the mid-nineteenth century provides us with all the necessary subtle differences to broaden our imagination about enmification. My central thesis is, that the reception of the establishment of enemy images by the Union government and by spontaneously organized groups from inside the society was utterly based on long-term interests and stereotypes already efficient among the American people. Furthermore, I want to show, that there were different enemy images among different social, ethnical, and religious groups. In the end, this made all efforts of the Lincoln administration to guarantee the political homogeneity in the army and at the homefront inefficient and dysfunctional. Even the ideological coherence of the United States' armed forces was always in danger. The United States of America were a shaken nation when they reached their eighth decennial in 1856.23 The strife for a renewal of the Union commenced from a variety of reasons, among them constitutional issues, the quest for a genuine national identity and the integration of foreign immigrants, class struggles, partisan affiliations, and, last, but not least, the bitter an emotion-ladden rivalry between the agrarian Southern part of the country with its "peculiar institution" and the industrial North on slavery. All these issues were intensely intertwined with and often radicalised by sweeping religious revivals, the so-called Second Great Awakening among Protestant middle classes24 and the rise of ultramontanism among working-class Roman Catholics.25 Basically, at least This is, however, a simplifying view. The Southern Confederacy faced plenty of difficulties holding the different single states together. Furthermore, many social distinctions endangered the unity of the South. But the ethnopolitical differences were less apparent, due to the single party system that had previously evolved in many Southern states, see William C. Davis, Look Away! A History of the Confederate States ofAmerica (New York, 2002). David M. Potter, The Impending Crisis, 1848-1861 (New York, 1976); Richard H. Sewell, A House Divided: Sectionalism and Civil War, 1848-1865 (Baltimore, 1988); William E. Gienapp, "The Crisis of American Democracy: The Political System and the Coming of the Civil War", in Why the Civil War Came, ed. Gabor S. Borritt (New York, 1996), pp. 79-124; Brian Holden Reid, The Origins of the American Civil War (London, 1996); Kenneth M. Stampp, America in 1857: A Nation on the Brink (New York, 1990); James McPherson, Für die Freiheit sterben: Die Geschichte des amerikanischen Bürgerkrieges, trans. Holger Fließbach and Christa Seibicke (München, 1996), pp. 1-158. Cf. Mark A. Noll, America's God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (New York, 2002); Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven, 1989); Douglas M. Strong, Perfectionist Politics: Abolitionism and the Religious Tensions of American Democracy (Syracuse, 1999); Richard J. Carwardine, Evangelicals and Politics in Antebellum America (New Haven, 1993). James Hennesey, American Catholics: A History of the Roman Catholic Community in the United States (New York, 1983), pp. 117-57; Jay P. Dolan, In Search of an American Catholicism: A History of Religion and Culture in Tension (New York, 2002), pp. 47-70; John T. McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom: A History (New York, 2003), pp. 19-90; Michael Hochgeschwender, "Ultramontaner Katholizismus und amerikanische Demokratie, 1830-1860", in Katholizismus im atlantischen Raum, ed. Werner Kremp (Trier, 2004), pp. 63-86.

Enemy Images in the American Civil

War

two to four different cultures coexisted

especially party politics shaped the nation.26

203

uncomfortably

in the United States. Yet,

For more than five decades the Southern culture had been politically and socially in the lead. Since 1800, when Thomas Jefferson had been elected president, the formerly revolutionary Democratic-Republican party, than turned Democratic party, had served as the most powerful and influential union-wide organization of the country. It was, however, more than only a party. It constituted over the time a whole culture and a lifestyle, at least since the presidency of Andrew Jackson, when it became more and more conservative.27 In general, the Democrats favoured an agrarian or better: a traditional face-to-face vision of society.28 They argued in favour of Jefferson's and Jackson's romanticist and Utopian yeomen democracy, a political unit that would exclusively be based on the political power of small agrarian unit's stakeholders or proprietors with a specific egalitarian way of thought. Together with the classical republicanism of the Democrats this concept of yeomen democracy served as an interpretative socio-economic and political framework that was critical about modem urban capitalism (without actually opposing a market society or private property) and of anonymously overarching structures, such as, for instance, monopolies, trusts, nationwide acting banks or a strong central government. Subsequently, the Democrats stood for a decentralized society with a strict interpretation of the U.S. constitution and a rigid limitation of governmental and economic power (at least in theory). Moreover, the Democratic party actively denounced the exclusivist Anglo-Saxon Protestantism of Northern middle-class evangelicals who were the backbone of both, the Whigs and the Republican party. In opposition to the Whigs and Republicans, the Democrats never interpreted American identity as based on Anglo-Saxon culture or Protestant religion. They, on the contrary, shared an inclusivist idea of whiteness as central aspect of American identity. As a result, the Democratic political culture became more and more involved with an essentialist racism. Starting with the election campaign 1840, the Democrats and their propaganda apparatus stirred up anti-Negro feelings in the American public. On the one hand, this was helpful in defending slavery, on the other hand, the anti-miscegenation campaigns provided the party with the loyalty and allegiance of Irish immigrants, whose standing in American society was relatively weak, as they were seen as "white niggers" by many Anglo-Saxon Protestants.29 Therefore, the Democrats were able to actively integrate Roman Catholic immigrants For a rivalling account see Mark Voss-Hubbard, Beyond Party: Cultures of Antipartizanship in Northern Politics before the Civil War (Baltimore, 2002). Cf. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Age of Jackson (Boston, 1945); Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It (NewYork, 1989), pp. 57-118. A good interpretation of the Democratic impulse is presented by John Ashworth, Slavery, Capitalism, and Politics in the Antebellum Republic, 1: Commerce and Compromise, 1820-1850

(New York, 1995). Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (London, 1985).

Noel

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Michael Hochgesch wender

by stabilizing

their social capital as white persons. Nevertheless, this integrational based on deeply rooted racial stereotypes about oversexualized, brutal and inhuman Negroes endangering the stability of U.S. society. This integrationist strategy was so successful, because not only Irish Catholics and Democrats shared these antiblack feelings. They were rather strong even among Republicans, Whigs, and Nativists. It was, thus, no wonder, that the Democratic party integrated the seemingly contradictory interests of Southern slave-holding, agrarian semiaristocrats, Northern Roman Catholic immigrants, and members of the urban workings classes, who all remained sceptical about a strong central government and race reform. As a result, the Democrats were after the rapid decline of the liberal Whig party in the 1850s30 the only union-wide organized party. The nativist, anti-Catholic American party was a possible exception, but it declined after the foundation of the Republican party in 1854. Later, many nativists became members of the Republican party.31 While the Democrats upheld the common cause of common white men, the Republicans were up to a certain degree the genuine opposite of the Democrats.32 Northern and sectionalist by any possible standard, they represented the interests of the liberal and evangelical middle class of the urban centers in New England and the midAtlantic region. Furthermore, the party had strongholds in the mid-West. Its constituency shared strong capitalist and etatist sentiments and included as well abolitionists as nativists. The party ideologues made use of the broad interpretation of the constitution. They generally preferred an exclusionist version of defining national identity. In many ways the Republicans, especially their moderate and conservative wings, were as racist as the Democrats. Only the Radical Republicans, the prominent left wing of the party, including liberal and revolutionary European immigrants and liberal or evangelical abolitionists, wanted a totally new relationship between black and white in the U.S. In general, the ideal of the early Republican party was a modem, liberal and capitalist bourgeois society with a strong affiliation to evangelical, millenarian Protestant values. Therefore, in the eyes of many Republicans the very notion of yeomen democracy seemed to be outdated and old-fashioned. They wanted to reform the whole of American society and to form a new, perfect society in a perfect state. The fundament of this anti-Democratic and anti-establishment counterculture the creed, that mankind could were evangelical and liberal-enlightened perfectionism be actively led to universal salvation and a more perfect union with God and progress. success was

-

-

-

Cf. Michael F. Holt, The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War (New York, 1999); Daniel W. Howe, The Political Culture of the American

31 32

Whigs (Chicago, 1979). Tyler Anbinder, The Northern Know-Nothings and the Politics of the 1850s (New York, 1992). Cf. Richard H. Abbott, The Republican Party and the South, 1855-1877 (Chapel Hill, 1986); Lewis L. Gould, Grand Old Party: A History of the Republicans (New York, 2002); Robert F. Engs, The Birth of the Grand Old Party: The Republican's First Generation (Philadelphia, 2002).

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In the face of these grave ethnocultural and partisan differences among Americans in the Antebellum era it is understandable that the American society of the 1840s and 1850s was riotous and significantly more violent than traditional European societies.33 It was also a clear signal that the U.S. lacked a functioning cohesive structure or ideology. As long as the sociocultural frameworks of Americans were shaped exclusively by partizan and particularist forces, the danger of a split became over the years more prominent. The government and the people tried to overcome this situation with stronger appeals to Union patriotism. But, anyway, even the yearly banquettes on July 4th or Washington's Birthday were split along partisan lines.34 Maybe the Civil War was not the result of an irrepressible conflict. It was, nonetheless, a logical consequence of the obvious social contradictions within a complex and diverse society. These contradictions formed the basis of strong partisan convictions. They, moreover, overshadowed any attempt to enforce a cohesive ideology among the citizens of the Northern Union during the Civil War. Conflict was, nevertheless, not the only mode of political culture in American prewar society. The enemy images of the Civil War were not only the result of divided political cultures. In a paradoxical and dialectical way, they were as well a result of mutually shared convictions and values. Since the War of 1812 and the War of 1846 there existed a body of common expectations and behavioural rules, of political festivities,35 as, for example, the commemoration of the founding fathers, the reliance on the constitution as a masterpiece of human ratio and so forth. They all were core elements of a shared Americanism. These overarching universal ideas and festivities on the one hand transcended every conflict. Even during the War between the States, the Southerners would boast their genuine Americanism, their heritage of the revolutionary ideas of 1776, and their loyalty to the founding fathers. Both sides were proud to have heirs of the Washington, Jefferson, or Adams families among their soldiers. Yet, on the other hand, this set of ideas and practises was in itself perceived along partisan lines. Insofar, the political rituals of American civil religion in the 1850s already anticipated the flawed situation of the early 1860s. This specifically framed confrontation with its conspicuous dialectics of commonly shared values and multi-faceted conflict formed the very basis of the formation and reception of enemy images during the war after 1861.

David Grimsted, American Mobbing, 1828-1861: Toward Civil War (New York, 1998). Cf. Mary P. Ryan, Civic Wars: Democracy and Public Life in the American City during the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley, 1997). Jürgen Heideking et al., eds., Celebrating Ethnicity and Nation: American Festive Culture from the Revolution to the Early 20th Century (New York, 2001).

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III. When after December 1860 the Union was split up by the secession of South Carolina and other Southern states, the whole political system of the North fell into agony.36 Henceforth, the first, more or less spontaneous enemy images emerged from rivalling party backgrounds. The party of Jefferson and Jackson with its rich tradition of national unity broke into pieces. As a result, any major opposition against the Republican Lincoln administration for some years lacked authority. It was, thereby, decisively weakened, but not without support, especially among Irish and German Catholics. Moreover, many Democrats in the border states and in Pennsylvania, Indiana or Ohio had deep sympathies with the cause of the Confederacy. This did, however, not shape the Democratic first reactions after the secession. A majority of Democrats joined the War Democratic efforts to form an alliance of national unity with the ruling Republicans. Many of them were middle-class and Protestant, but they included a certain portion of Irish Catholics who with some fervour wanted to serve the cause of the Union. Their enemies were the Confederate secessionists and their war aim was the reconstruction of the status quo ante bellum. In opposition to the Radical Republicans, the War Democrats and the Irish Catholics only wanted to fight for Union and Constitution, but not for the end of slavery. The Peace Democrats on the other hand, many of them mid-Westerners and working-class Catholics, went on opposing the war efforts, because they in no way shared the common belief among Northerners, that the secession was unpatriotic and illegal. They felt that the South had a legitimate right to leave a union of sovereign states that had denied the Southerners their interests and honour. Besides, many working-class followers of Peace Democracy acted out of anticapitalist motivations. In their eyes, the middle-class Evangelicals and liberals enforcing the war were bigots, trying to undermine the strength of the American labour movement by freeing slave labour. Therefore, the Peace Democrats never accepted the enemy image of the Southern traitor and sinful slaveholder as represented by Radical Republican propaganda. They even never spoke of "rebels". Instead, they favoured the notion "Confederate". Their enemies were the Republican party and the War Democrats. For the Radical

Republicans, i.e. the evangelical or free-thinking immediatist this war was a result of a satanic conspiracy between the dubious forces of abolitionists, aristocratic slave power and the popish tyranny in Rome with its Irish and German agents in the Union. Thus, the sinful slaveholders, those aristocratic enemies of democracy and liberty had to be exterminated from the holy land of the new Jerusalem in order to restore a more sacred Union. Moreover, the Roman Catholics were seen as a Cf. McPherson, Für die Freiheit sterben

(see above, n. 23), pp. 159-295; Michael Wahrheit, Einheit, Hochgeschwender, Ordnung: Der US-amerikanische Katholizismus und die

Sklavenfrage,

1835-1870 (Habilitationsschrift, Tübingen,

2003).

Enemy Images in the American Civil War

207

fifth column inside the Union, were they, according to the accounts of radical Republicans, served a natural allies of slave power, so to speak. This was clearly the language of manichaean nativism. The Radicals were, however, a tiny, yet boisterous minority. But they were able to gain more influence during the war. Their propaganda apparatus, based on the organizational structure of the evangelical movement, was perhaps the most professional during the early phase of the war. Thus, the Radicals were able and willing to set the question of slavery and the quest for emancipation on the political agenda of the unwilling Lincoln administration.37 As a result, they seemed to be much more important than their numbers indicated. And they were able to spread fear among Roman Catholics and conservative Peace Democrats. Due to sheer number, the most important socio-political group in the Northern Union was a coalition between moderate and conservative, mostly old-line Whig proponents in the Republican party and War Democrats, among them some Unionists from the upper South, such as, for example, Andrew Johnson.38 Until the famous and notorious Emancipation Proclamation from 1862/63, they interpreted the war as an effort to reunite the Union under the auspices of the traditional social and constitutional system. Unlike the Radicals, they were neither interested in the abolition of slavery nor in the total destmction of the Southern slave-holding aristocracy. Particularly, the War Democrats opposed any social revolution in the South, as they feared, that revolution could lead to the neglect of existing property rights. Furthermore, the moderates and conservatives held strong anti-Negro convictions. In their eyes, the Southerners were unlawful rebels, who had to be and could be reconciled with the traditional ideals of the Union. For this majority other enemy images were never as important as the idea of the traitorous secessionist. They fought for positive, affirmative values, especially Union, Constitution, and republican liberty. Only after 1863 this coalition became somewhat fragile. After the Emancipation Proclamation many moderates and War Democrats joined the Radicals in their fight against slavery, thereby estranging the conservatives and frustrating the Peace Democrats.39 Besides, among the majority, class and gender proved to be importantly women from the middle-classes, even Roman Catholics and War Democrats, were much more radical in displaying anti-slavery feelings, than males from the working-class. Abolitionism always had been part of a middle-class

discourse.40

Cf. Jörg Nagler, "Loyalty and Dissent: The Home Front in the American Civil War", in On the Road to Total War: The American Civil War and the German Wars of Unification, 1861-1871, eds. Jörg Nagler and Stig Förster (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 329-55. Cf. Hans L. Trefousse, Andrew Johnson: A Biography (New York, 1989), pp. 128-92. Christopher Dell, Lincoln and the War Democrats: The Erosion of Conservative Tradition

(Rutherford, 1975). See for example the letters of Eliza Starr (University of Notre Dame-Archives, CSTA) Ewing Sherman (University of Notre Dame-Archives, CSHR).

or

Ellen

Michael Hochgeschwender

208

Because of the complexity of the situation at the beginning of the war, there were nearly no chances to form commonly shared, non-partizan enemy images within the armed forces of the Union, even less within American society as a whole. Anyhow, the administration and especially the Republican party and its fellow-travelling organizations from 1863 on tried to enforce their enemy images. Therefore, they formed their own propaganda apparatus, again based on the already existing structures of Thus they tried to counter the growing Democratic anti-war awakened that based the Democratic party machines and their own pre-war was on effort, far as we can see it, neither the Radicals nor the Peace propaganda apparatus. As Democrats gained much ground. The persisting influence of pre-war images and stereotypes was still too forceful. Soldiers and civilians in their vast majority still clung to their traditional affiliations and convictions. Moreover, the war propaganda of the Radical Republicans, especially the Union even became dysfunctional. Many soldiers and even more civilians of Democratic background, predominantly Irish Catholics, just refused fighting an emancipatory, abolitionist war. Consequently, they never embraced the enemy images of the Radicals. After the Emancipation Proclamation their antipathy against the Radicals joined force with frustration about the draft practice in the Union. Many Irish and German Catholics became so alienated from the war aims and enemy images of the Radicals, that their protest bust into violence. The Draft Riots of summer 1863, the most prominent of them the New York Draft Riot, included massive protests against the way many Republicans defined the war. Thus, they killed Republicans and Negroes. Moreover, the rioters fought against Peace Democrats. They wanted to symbolize both, their unionist patriotism, and their antiRepublican and racist sentiments.43 Thus, the draft riots were not only part of a class struggle, they derived from a cultural struggle about the hegemony to define the aims and enemies in this war. Only very few former Democrats "converted" to a more radical standpoint. Many of them had a middle-class background or were willing to gain middle-class status. Therefore, inside the Union army predominantly officers or NCO's actively shared the official enemy while regular soldiers from a working-class or a rural did not background explicitly fight against slavery or slaveholders. They still accepted

evangelicalism.41

Leagues?2

images,44

41

42

43

44

Philip S. Paludan, '"The Better Angels of Our Nature': Lincoln, Propaganda, and the Public Opinion during the Civil War", in Road to Total War, eds. Förster and Nagler (see above, n. 37), Cf.

pp. 351-76.

Only superficially enlightening Clement M. Silvestro, Rally Round the Flag: The Union Leagues in the Civil War (Ann Arbor, 1966). Iver Bernstein, The New York City Draft Riots: Their Significance for American Society and Politics in the Age of the Civil War (New York, 1990). Cf. Lawrence Frederick Kohl and Margaret Cossé Richard, eds., Irish Green and Union Blue: The Civil War Letters of Peter Welsh (New York, 1986); Kevin E. O'Brien, ed., My Life in the Irish Brigade: The Civil War Memoirs of Private William McCarter, 116th Pennsylvania Infantiy (Cambridge, 2003).

Enemy Images in the American Civil War

209

only the enemy image of the secessionist and rebel. Many of them deliberately hated blacks. Their racial prejudices were often stronger than those of white Southerners in Dixie. Therefore, these soldiers had different reasons for fighting in this war and enemy images were rather secondary. The most prominent factor was honour. They wanted to prove their loyalty to the (moderate) cause of the Union and they wanted to display bravery and comradeship. Finally, many immigrants wanted to prove their whiteness by being brave. But still, the most important factor was comradeship. Often enough the troops were recruited from the same neighbourhoods. Nobody wanted to be a coward among his peers. So, manliness, whiteness, honour, and friendship bound the lowerclass soldiers to their units.45 There was but one propaganda campaign of the Lincoln administration that proved to be successful in installing a common, mutually shared enemy image among Unionists: the fight against the "enemy from within", the so-called Copperhead movement.46 Agents of the Pinkerton detective agency, that for some time served as a private secret service for the President, had claimed that they had discovered a vast major conspiracy among the Peace Democrats that allegedly had aimed at the total destmction of the U.S. by the means of high treason. The supposed leader of this wide-spread conspiracy was said to be the Ohio politician Clement Vallendigham, who was allegedly supported by many Irish Catholics. From 1863 onward, following the events of the draft riots, the Republican press and the administration's propaganda tools fired vehemently against and in this single case, they were able to convince this immense conspiracy Democrats. Today we know that the whole Copperhead story was more or less a fake. During the war, however, it served its purpose. The specific situation made many people believe in dangerous and traitorous conspiracies, especially because it was not only a discourse. There were "enemies from within", spies and secret agents working for the other side.47 This was the fundamentum in re for the conspiracy discourse in the time of war. The Copperhead myth could work, because it had this foundation in reality and because it was independent from the racial aspects of the war. The enemy image was about the rebel and the traitor, not about abolitionism. Thus, it was able to seive as foundation for post-war reconciliation: The war itself became a honourable cause for both sides, with the very exception of the "traitors". Moreover, racism became the -

McPherson, For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War (New York, 1997); William C. Davis, Lincoln's Men: How President Lincoln Became Father to an Army and a Nation (New York, 1999). Both authors tend to overestimate the importance of the "cause" and of Lincoln. This is due to their usage of sources predominantly from middle-class soldiers. Cf. Joseph A. Frank, With Ballot and Bayonet: The Political Socialization of American Civil War Soldiers (Athens, 1998). Frank L. Klement, The Copperheads in the Middle West (Chicago, 1960). Donald E. Markle, Spies and Spymasters of the Civil War (New York, 2000). James M.

210

Michael Hochgeschwender

for reconciliation after 1885. This proved, that the Radical in trying to convince Unionists of their cause: abolition of slavery and the reform of the South. A vast majority of white Americans rejected this cause and its underlying enemy images, because they were perceiving the enemy on the basis of long-term racist and patriotic convictions that were opposed to those of Radicalism. It was during and after the war impossible for the administration to get rid of the longterm effects of these discourses. Therefore, the impact of actually stereotyped enemy images in this modern, fragmented society was rather limited.

ground propaganda failed common

David W.

Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, 2001); Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Die Kultur der Niederlage (Berlin, 2001); Cecilia E. O'Leary, To Die For: The Paradox ofAmerican Patriotism (Princeton, 1999).

VI.

Protagonists of WarPlurality of Violence and its Monopoly

Andrew Ayton

From Muhi to Mohâcs

-

Armies and Combatants in Later Medieval European Transcultural Wars

I. be learnt about medieval warfare from the study of battles.'1 J.F. observation is particularly apposite when applied to later medieval Verbruggen's transcultural warfare. Yet, to approach the study of armies and their personnel through an investigation of the battles that they fought may not receive universal approval. After all, is it not the case that (to quote John Gillingham) 'in European medieval history as a whole battles are rare and making war did not normally involve seeking battle'?2 Consequently, would we not be in danger of presenting a distorted impression of medieval warfare if we were to focus primarily on battle? It is not my intention in this paper to challenge what has been termed the 'new orthodoxy'.3 But at risk of giving unintended comfort to those 'really influential historians of war' who have doubted the existence of 'strategy and generalship' in the middle ages4 we shall nevertheless be concerned rather more with what took place when armies met in battle than with siege operations or the routine devastation inflicted by chevauchées. There are several reasons for this. Battle provides a convenient point of reference in what can be no more than a preliminary foray into a large and complex subject the comparative study of armies in late medieval transcultural warfare. And the selection of this particular point of reference has been suggested by the strengths and weaknesses of the 'A great deal

can

-

-

-

Verbruggen, The Art of Warfare in Western Europe during the Middle Ages, 2nd ed. (Woodbridge, 1997), p. 9. John Gillingham, "Richard I and the Science of War in the Middle Ages", in Anglo-Norman Warfare, ed. Matthew Strickland (Woodbridge, 1992), pp. 194-207, here p. 207. Michael Prestwich, Armies and Warfare in the Middle Ages: The English Experience (New Haven, 1996), p. 11. John Gillingham, '"Up with Orthodoxy!': In Defence of Vegetian Warfare", The Journal of Medieval Military History 2 (2002), pp. 149-58, here p. 151. Jan-Frans

2

3

4

214

available

Andrew Ayton sources:

it has not been

shortly).

imposed upon them (a point to which we shall return

In addition to these 'practical' considerations, there are also sound 'historical' for focussing on battles in this paper. The first is that in at least some of the theatres of late medieval transcultural warfare, battles were anything but 'rare'. Of course, there will be differences of opinion over what constitutes a 'battle' and how infrequent they need to be before they may legitimately be judged 'rare'. Historians would do well to take heed of John Gillingham's recent plea for greater precision in the measurement of battle frequency;5 but, again, we must postpone such analysis to another occasion (as we must the separate issue of 'significance'). For our present purpose, it is sufficient to emphasise that battles were at least relatively frequent events in the transcultural wars that are our primary concern,6 and that a good many of them were large-scale encounters resulting in heavy losses, for one or both of the protagonists, and strategically significant consequences. During the Hussite wars, for example, battles occurred regularly, even if some of the later ones involved little more than the flight of the crusader army at the approach of the Hussite military machine.7 Similarly and of particular relevance to this paper Hungary's transcultural wars from Muhi to Mohâcs were studded with battlefield confrontations. Jânos Hunyadi is as renowned in Hungary for his military career as Richard the Lionheart, Edward III and Henry V are in England, and yet his tally of battles far exceeds theirs.8 It is not just the frequency of battles, and the consequences that they had, that make them a natural object of study for scholars concerned with the structure and composition of armies engaged in transcultural warfare. It is also because the circumstances of battle bring the distinctive features of military organisation into sharp relief. They highlight strengths and weaknesses, and expose the contrasts, and sometimes the similarities, between military systems engaged in intercultural or subcultural warfare.9 Contrasts in army organisation and tactics are readily visible: witness, for example, the confrontations of nomadic horse archers and mailed knights reasons

-

-

5 6

Gillingham, '"Up with Orthodoxy!'", p. 150. I hope to examine the reasons for this in future publications. Of relevance here is the theoretical framework presented in Stephen Morillo, "Battle Seeking: The Contexts and Limits of Vegetian Strategy", The Journal of Medieval Military History 1 (2002), pp. 21-41. For example, Morillo points out that "battle was the clear and swiftly sought arbiter" in warfare among steppe nomads, and that the "world view bred

7

8

9

on

the steppes tended to carry

neighbours". Morillo, "Battle Seeking", pp. 30-31. See Thomas Fudge, The Crusade against Heretics

xxii, map 3.

in

over

in nomadic attacks

on

sedentary

Bohemia, 1418-1437 (Aldershot, 2002), p.

example, Hunyadi fought battles with Napoleonic frequency during the period from Bâtaszék (1441) to Varna (1444): see Joseph Held, Hunyadi: Legend and Reality (New York, 1985), chapters 5 and 6; Camil Muresanu, John Hunyadi: Defender of Christendom (Iasi, 2001), chapters For

5, 6 and 7. The terminology proposed in Stephen Morillo's paper in this volume is employed here.

From Muhi to Mohâcs

215

place in the Latin East and (to a lesser extent) in eastern Europe; or the devastating effect of the Hussites' Wagenburgen on the series of conventional armies sent against them.10 The similarities between military systems may not be as readily apparent, but as we shall see they may be quite as instructive as the differences. That some of our warring peoples tried to avoid pitched battles is also revealing. The pagan Lithuanians' preference for guerrilla warfare in their protracted struggle with the Teutonic Knights reveals much about the strengths and skills of the protagonists in that 'other Hundred Years War'.11 As noted earlier, the selection of battle as the principal point of reference in this study has been strongly influenced by the characteristics of the available sources. In fact, it is the weaknesses of the sources that are most apparent. Many of the armies that such as muster concern us are poorly documented. Systematic administrative records rolls written either contracts because or are lists, pay usually lacking, they have not survived or because they were never drawn up. In pagan Lithuania, a formable opponent for the Prussian Ordensstaat, 'remembrance was more common a record than parchment' and the oral memory has long since faded.12 What little direct evidence that we have for the Ottoman armies that performed so effectively in the Balkans in the second half of the fourteenth century must be gathered from narrative sources.13 The armies of the Christian states are often no more abundantly documented. Of the Hungarian army that marched into the Carpathians in 1368 and was destroyed when 'a great number of Wallachians rushed upon [it] from the forests and mountains', we know nothing save the names of its leaders who were killed.14 The extent of the documentary shortfall is made manifest when the available evidence for one of the protagonists in a conflict far outstrips that for the other, as we find in the AngloScottish transcultural wars, or when a richly documented contingent from western Europe joins a crusade in Prussia or the Balkans.15 It is small wonder, therefore, that the that took

-

-

-

-

10

"

12 13

14

15

extracts describing the Hussite wagon fortresses in action, see Fudge, The Crusade Heretics, pp. 124-26, 140, 143-44, 166, 179-80. against Stephen Rowell, Lithuania Ascending: A Pagan Empire within East-Central Europe, 1295-1345

For

source

(Cambridge, 1994), pp. 243-44. Rowell, Lithuania Ascending, p. 38. As is made clear by Colin Imber, The Ottoman Empire, 1300-1650. The Structure of Power (Basingstoke, 2002), chapter 7: 'The Army'. For more detail, see Gy Kâldy-Nagy, "The First Centuries of the Ottoman Military Organisation", Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 31 (1977), pp. 147-83. Among medieval Islamic armies, by far the most fully documented is that of the Mamluk Sultanate: see David Ayalon, Studies on the Mamluks of Egypt (1250-15IT) (London, 1977), chapters 1 and 8. Johannes de Thurocz, Chronica Hungarorum, eds. Erzsébet Galântai and Gyula Kristö (Budapest, 1985), 1:181. For contingents of Hainaulters in Prussia in the 1330s and '40s, see Claude Gaier, "Achats d'armes et expéditions militaires en Prusse et autres lieux du comte Guillaume II de Hainault (1336-1344)", in Armes et combats dans l'univers médiéval, ed. Claude Gaier (Brussels, 1995), pp. 229-42, and sources

cited there.

216

Andrew Ayton

structural analysis of armies engaged in transcultural warfare has often rested upon extrapolation from isolated documentary fragments,16 or upon conclusions drawn from 'theoretical' rather than 'real' data that is, from records of military obligation and collections of laws rather than from pay and muster records. Take, for example, the mditia portalis, which was established by decree after the battle of Nicopolis and subsequently modified on several occasions. Its prominent place in historical writing on Hungarian military institutions is simply not matched by a documented role in the Turkish wars.17 With the analysis of army structures beset with such difficulties, what hope is there that rank and file military personnel can be brought under the spotlight? Prosopography has been shown to be a valuable methodological tool for understanding the functioning of later medieval armies,18 but with a few well-documented exceptions (as noted above), the prosopographical analysis of armies engaged in transcultural warfare is clearly impossible. At best, we can study the careers of their commanders. It is the necessarily heavy reliance on narrative source evidence that has been most influential in prompting the decision to focus on battle in this study. Of course, that evidence is uneven in coverage and quality. Some transcultural conflicts are fmstratingly elusive. Louis 'the Great' of Hungary (1342-82) waged war incessantly against his schismatic neighbours in the Balkans and yet we know very little about many of his campaigns, let alone the battles that may have been fought. Where there is an abundance of narratives, the historian faces a very different challenge. Thus, although near contemporary and later accounts of the battle of Kosovo (1389) are relatively plentiful, it is impossible to reconcile their testimony concerning the size of the armies, the course of the battle, or even its immediate outcome.19 While Kosovo may represent an extreme case, some historians would argue that the interpretative problems that it presents are widely encountered, and that we delude ourselves if we believe that we can 'reconstruct' any medieval battle.20 Fortunately our present task, which may be characterised as 'imagining medieval armies in action on the battlefield', is somewhat different. Establishing an uninterrupted narrative line for a battle is not essential. And for all the interpretative problems that are inevitably thrown up by the -

17

18

19

20

For example, "some light is thrown on the composition of [the Hungarian army under Louis the Great] by a couple of summonses [from 1362] that have been preserved by chance": Päl Engel, The Realm of St Stephen: A History ofMedieval Hungary, 895-1526 (London, 2001), p. 184. Jânos Bäk, Pal Engel and James Ross Sweeney, eds. The Laws of the Medieval Kingdom of Hungary, 2: 1301-1457 (Salt Lake City, 1992), pp. 21-28, 176-83; Andras Borosy, "The Militia Portalis in Hungary before 1526", in From Hunyadi to Râkôczi: War and Society in Late Medieval and Early Modern Hungary, eds. Jânos Bäk and Béla Kirâly (New York, 1982), pp. 63-80. For example English armies: Andrew Ayton and Philip Preston, The Battle of Crécy, 1346 (Woodbridge, 2005), chapter 5. French armies: Philippe Contamine, Guerre, état et société à la fin du moyen âge (Paris, 1972). Rade Mihaljcic, The Battle of Kosovo in History and Popular Tradition (Belgrade, 1989), pp. 4251; Thomas Emmert, Serbian Golgotha: Kosovo, 1389 (New York, 1990). For a discussion of the problem, see Ayton and Preston, The Battle of Crécy, pp. 8-10, 287-350.

217

From Muhi to Mohâcs

chronicles, they also present much evidence of substance, including vivid snapshots of combat. Combining such testimony with those fragments of evidence that can be found elsewhere brings, for at least some of our battlefield encounters, the features of military organisation in the protagonists' armies into sharp relief. Some attention has been given to source problems because it is important to understand the constraints that they impose upon our investigation, and in particular upon any attempt to make meaningful comparisons between the military structures and personnel of different medieval states, especially in the transcultural sphere. Bearing this in mind, and in order to achieve a degree of coherence in a preliminary study of a complex subject, this paper will focus in particular on one region: east-central and south-eastern Europe, centring on the experience of Hungary. From their audacious tenth-century raids into western Europe and Byzantium, via their defeats at the hands of the Mongols and the Hussites, to their protracted struggle with the Ottoman Turks during the later middle ages, the Hungarians were at the centre of a series of transcultural wars. There was nothing parochial about these conflicts, which in scale and ferocity rank alongside any that occurred in medieval Europe. Our investigation of the armies that were engaged in them is intended primarily as a contribution to the study of transcultural warfare, but it may also add a little detail to the panoramic picture of medieval European warfare that has been presented in works of synthesis by such scholars as Philippe Contamine and J.F. Verbruggen a picture that has tended to focus on France, her neighbours and her enemies. The transcultural wars that are our particular concern represent points of intersection in the experience of peoples whose interests and spheres of activity were, in general, very different from each other. Or, to express it another way, the conflicts that concern us were not the only (nor sometimes even the most important of the) military endeavours consuming the attention and resources of the protagonists engaged in them. Ideally, the wars in the zones of contact on the eastern and south-eastern fringes of Christendom should be placed within a much wider context. Hungary's later medieval military history involved not only transcultural wars with her schismatic, pagan and Islamic neighbours, but also campaigns in the Italian peninsula (under Louis the Great) and wars of territorial expansion into the heart of Europe (under Matthias Corvinus). For the Mongols, on the other hand, 'it was the Far East that mattered above all',21 and no serious study of these supreme nomadic warriors would fail to take account of the varied preoccupations and priorities that sprang from the vast extent of the Mongols' empire. But if a Eurocentric approach to the Mongols is hardly possible, such a view is more commonly encountered with regard to the Ottomans, and such a view wholly -

21

David Morgan, The Mongols (Oxford, 1986), p. 2. See also Denis Sinor, "The Mongols and Western Europe", in Inner Asia and its Contacts with Medieval Europe, ed. Denis Sinor (London, 1977), chapter 9, pp. 514-15.

Andrew Ayton

218

the challenges that they faced, their ambitions and their achievement. We should be aware of our protagonists' other wars (some of which were also transcultural), though an examination of them cannot be attempted here. Suffice to say that the experience of those wars affected the character of the conflicts that are our central concern, influencing the structure and composition of the armies involved, and their methods of waging war. Other contributors to this volume discuss the behaviour rooted in mutual incomprehension or anti-comprehension that occurred when armies met in transcultural warfare. Attention has also been drawn to contrasts in military organisation, and in this paper I should like to pursue this further and consider, firstly, how far transcultural warfare involving later medieval Europeans and their immediate eastern neighbours witnessed the clash of military systems that were fundamentally different from each other; and, secondly, whether our protagonists' military institutions developed along lines similar to those that have been traced (albeit with much local variation) in western Europe. With regard to the first problem: at first glance, it is indeed the contrasts in 'army style' that attract our attention. But the points of similarity between our protagonists' military institutions should not be ignored, not least because an awareness of them contributes to a more subtle understanding of military outcomes (by highlighting the real differences) and of the processes of imitation, adaptation and innovation that could affect the balance of advantage in transcultural wars. Recognition of these processes leads us to consider the development of military institutions in transcultural wars, and to ask whether it is possible to detect an underlying shift from a plurality to a monopoly of violence. The concluding section of the paper proposes a theoretical model for the study of medieval armies that draws on recent developments in network theory. Among the advantages offered by this model is that it enables us to adopt a comparative approach to the functioning of medieval armies in the transcultural sphere. As well as highlighting strengths and weaknesses, similarities and contrasts, a comparative approach brings into sharper focus the influences that powered

misrepresents

institutional

development.

II. We would expect intercultural warfare to give rise to the most extreme contrasts, but as has been pointed out elsewhere in this volume, such warfare had become less frequent by the later medieval period. The most clear-cut example arose from the Mongol assault on eastern Europe in 1241-2. Massive, coordinated attacks on Poland and Hungary

point emphasised by Jeremy Black, War and the World: Military Power and the Fate of Continents, 1450-2000 (New Haven, 2000): see pp. 20-23 for Ottoman rivalry with Safavid Persia and Mamluk Egypt in the early sixteenth century.

A

From Muhi to Mohâcs

219

resulted in practically simultaneous, catastrophic defeats for the Poles at Legnica and the Hungarians at Muhi on the River Sajö.23 Taking refuge in inaccessible fortresses proved to be the only successful form of resistance.24 A cursory glance at these events would suggest that a deep gulf separated the military systems of the Mongols and the Hungarians, and that the former enjoyed a clear superiority. That there was indeed a profound difference between their military institutions can scarcely be denied, for as John France has observed, the Mongols brought to Europe and the Middle East a 'systematised tribal warfare which, to a remarkable degree, adapted the natural instincts of a steppe people and made of them a highly disciplined mass army'.25 Although, by contemporary European standards, the Mongol army was very large, this was no amorphous mob, its disciplinary regime and tactical performance being rooted in a hierarchical, decimal structure that ranged from 'primary groups' of ten horsemen to the 'tiimen' of ten thousand.26 Each of these horsemen was accompanied by a string of remounts at least half a dozen; and it is this abundance that allowed them the fastpaced tactical flexibility on the battlefield that was crucial to the Mongols' success. Pressure would be applied by successive waves of mounted archers, unleashing heavy arrows at close range before turning away, and ever prepared for a feigned flight should the enemy be goaded into launching a counter attack. Steadily worn down by these frontal attacks, the enemy's flanks would be turned with the aim of achieving encirclement, followed by rapid demoralisation and piecemeal destruction.27 Tempting as it is to think of the Mongols as exponents of a kind of Blitzkrieg by horsepower, we should not forget that their Blitzkrieg was more tactical than strategic. The abundance of horses that allowed the Mongols exceptional battlefield manoeuvrability, and the dependence of these horses on grazing, restricted their rate of march. 'Steppe logistics -

John Saunders, The History of the Mongol Conquests (London, 1971), chapter 5 and sources cited there. For the Hungarian perspective, see Zoltan Kosztolnyik, Hungary in the Thirteenth Century (New York, 1996), chapters 4 and 5. For the importance of "an inflexible operational timetable" in Mongol strategic planning, see Denis Sinor, "On Mongol strategy", in Sinor, Inner Asia, chapter 16. Erik Fügedi, Castle and Society in Medieval Hungary, 1000-1437 (Budapest, 1986), chapter 2. This assumes a Mongol incursion of short duration. John of Piano Carpini warns that the "Tatars much prefer men to shut themselves into their cities and fortresses rather than fight with them in the open, for then they say they have got their little pigs shut in their sty". Christopher Dawson,

ed., Mission to Asia (New York, 1966; repr. Toronto, 1995), p. 49. John France, Western Warfare in the Age of the Crusades, 1000-1300 (London, 1999), p. 234. Morgan, The Mongols, pp. 84-91; testimony of John of Piano Carpini in Dawson, Mission to Asia, pp. 32-33. For the "primary group", see below, n. 138. John Masson Smith, "Ayn Jalut: Mamluk Success or Mongol Failure?", Harvard Journal ofAsiatic Studies 42 (1984), pp. 307-45, here pp. 314-20; John Masson Smith, "Mongol Society and Military in the Middle East: Antecedents and Adaptions", in War and Society in the Eastern Mediterranean from the Seventh to the Fifteenth Centuries, ed. Yaacov Lev (Leiden, 1997), pp. 249-66, here pp. 251-53.

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had its limitations', notes John Masson Smith. The Mongols' strategic triumph in Hungary was founded not upon 'lightning sweeps' but the coordinated movement of several armies. In some respects, the distinctive features of nomadic warfare as practised by the Mongols in 1241 would have been familiar to those Europeans who had fought in the Latin East. Such familiarity would surely have been shared by the Hungarians. As nomadic mounted archers, the Magyars had themselves terrorised Europe during the tenth century. Their adoption of Christianity did not prompt the wholesale abandonment of their distinctive military traditions. Assembled alongside the westernstyle mailed cavalry of the royal and baronial households were the light horse of the general noble levy, as well as authentic nomadic warriors the Pechenegs, Szeklers and Cumans.29 The latter were effectively deployed at the battle on the river Leitha in 1146 (executing a feigned flight), while Hungarian and Cumanian mounted archers were to play an important part in the battle of Dürnkrut in 1278, just as they had in Béla IV's campaigns in Austria and Styria.30 Unfortunately, Hungary's hybrid military system suffered a severe blow on the eve of the Mongol invasion when Béla IV lost the services of the Cumans after their leader was murdered.31 Béla may have expected his remaining mounted archers to hold their own against the Mongols in a conventional pitched battle, especially as they would be backed-up by his barons' heavy cavalry contingents. There were, however, problems with this reasoning. The first was that the light cavalry of the general noble levy could not hope to match the Mongols' nomadic style of combat. Hungarian society had long-since become sedentary. Might not the armoured reserve be able to play a decisive role? Nomadic light horse were known to be vulnerable in close-quarters combat against disciplined, well-armed opponents. At the battle of the Lech in 955, Otto I's armati had overwhelmed the Magyars, who were (according to Widukind of Corvey) 'for the most part destitute of all arms'.32 There are indications that Béla's heavy cavalry did indeed fight well at Muhi, but their -

28

9

30

Smith, "Ayn Jalut", pp. 335-39. Andrâs Pâlôczi Horvâth, Pechenegs, Cumans, Iasians.

(Budapest, 1989).

32

in Medieval

Hungary

Pâlôczi Horvâth, Pechenegs, Cumans, Iasians, pp. 30-31, 68-77; Simonis de Kéza, Gesta eds. Lâszlô Veszprémy and Frank Schaer (Budapest, 1999), pp. 152-55. For a "reconstruction" of Dürnkrut based upon an exhaustive analysis of the sources, see Andreas Kusternig, "Probleme um die Kämpfe zwischen Rudolf und Ottokar und die Schlacht bei Dürnkrut und Jedenspeigen am 26. August 1278", Jahrbuch des Vereins für Landeskunde von Niederösterreich /VF 44-45 (1978-79), pp. 226-311. Lightly equipped, mounted archers continued to form a distinctive and numerically significant component in Hungarian armies in later centuries. Pâlôczi Horvâth, Pechenegs, Cumans, Iasians, pp. 47-51. Karl Leyser, "The Battle of the Lech, 955. A Study in Tenth-Century Warfare", History 50 (1965), pp. 1-25, here p. 19. See also Charles Bowlus, "Tactical and Strategic Weaknesses of Horse Archers on the Eve of the First Crusade", in Autour de la première croisade, ed. Michel Balard (Paris, 1996), pp. 159-66.

Hungarorum,

31

Steppe Peoples

From Muhi to Mohâcs

221

adversaries in that battle may have differed from the tenth-century Magyars in one important respect. Recent research has shown that 'Mongol armies included a much larger number of heavily armoured close-combat cavalry than hitherto realised, and that they played a major role in Mongol successes on the battlefield'.33 If, in terms of the types of fighting men employed, there were some similarities between the armies of the protagonists in 1241, it was in the areas of command and control that the Mongols were markedly superior: planning and reconnaissance; coordination of effort and unity of purpose; discipline and tactical flexibility. Jan Dlugosz would write much later that the Polish defeat at Legnica was due to underhand Mongol tactics, including witchcraft.34 In truth, the Mongols were not exceptional in preferring the advantage of surprise to the lottery of a prearranged set-piece battle. Nor were they unique in their capacity to adapt their tactics to the topography that they encountered. At Muhi, they simply took advantage of Béla IV's poor generalship. His imprudently sited, over-congested camp was encircled by the Mongols following an undetected crossing of the River Sajö, and the Hungarian army, 'enclosed in a narrow pen like a flock of sheep', destroyed.35 To find parallels with the Alfonso XI's defeat of the Muslims at the battle of the River Salado, outside Tarifa, in 1340,36 is not to diminish the Mongol achievement in 1241, merely to contextualise it. As an example of transcultural warfare, the Mongol storm of 1241-2 was unusual, not least because its impact on Europe (excepting Russia) was so short-lived. It is tempting to ask what would have happened had the Mongols not withdrawn from Hungary following the death of Great Khan Ogedei. 'There was no reason to suppose that armies that had defeated the best in China and the Islamic world could throw against them would meet their match in Europe', argues David Morgan. 'Europe may David Nicolle, "Medieval Warfare: The Unfriendly Interface", The Journal of Military History 63 (1999), pp. 579-99, here p. 583, n. 13, citing Alexander Medveev's work; see also David Nicolle, "Jawshan, Cuirie and Coats-of-plates: An Alternative Line of Development for Hardened Leather Armour," in A Companion to Medieval Arms and Armour, ed. David Nicolle (Woodbridge, 2002), pp. 179-221, here pp. 183-84. For John of Piano Carpini's testimony, dating from the mid 1240s, see Dawson, Mission to Asia, pp. 33-34. Ioannes Dlugossius, Annales seu cronicae incliti regni Poloniae 7-8 (Warsaw, 1975), pp. 21-23. For western efforts to understand the defeat of 1241-42, see Jean Richard, "Les causes des victoires Mongoles d'après les historiens occidentaux du xiiie siècle", Central Asiatic Journal 23 (1979), pp. 104-17. Rogerius of Vârad, Rogerii Miserabile Carmen Super Destructione Regni Hungariae Per Tartaros Facta, ed. Lothar von Heinemann, MGH SS 29 (Hannover, 1892), pp. 557-59; Thomas of Spalato, Ex Thomae Historia pontificum Salonitanorum et Spalatinorum, ed. Lothar von Heinemann, MGH SS 29 (Hannover, 1892), pp. 586-89. See also Ioannes Dlugossius, Annales, 7-8:27-28; and Raleigh Skelton et al, eds., The Vinland Map and the Tartar Relation (New Haven, 1965), pp. 82-83. Nicolas Agrait, "The Experience of War in Fourteenth-Century Spain: Alfonso XI and the Capture of Algeciras (1342-1344)", in Crusaders, Condottieri and Cannon. Medieval Warfare in Societies around the Mediterranean, eds. Donald Kagay and Andrew Villalon (Leiden, 2003), pp. 213-35, here pp. 222-23.

Andrew Ayton

222

have had a lucky escape from becoming another province of a great Eurasian empire'. But is it safe to assume that Mongol military superiority would have carried them to the English Channel? It is certainly far from clear how well the varied military structures of western Europe would have stood up to a Mongol assault; but a successful military system's Achilles heel is as likely to be political or logistical as tactical. Even if the dynastic politics of the Mongol empire in the years after Ögedei's death had allowed for a renewed invasion of Europe in force (and had Great Khan Möngke not favoured a southward drive into the Middle East),38 we must suspect that nomadic horsemen would have found campaigning conditions a good deal less favourable west of the Carpathian basin. There may have been insufficient pasture even in the Hungarian plain to maintain the full-scale nomadic war machine.39 Some light is cast on this problem by an examination of the Mongols' subsequent military performance in Europe and the Middle East. Indeed, such an exercise yields what is in effect a case study on how the cutting edge of an apparently unstoppable military power is liable to lose its sharpness with time. By way of introduction to this exercise, and to contextualise it, some general observations that draw on other instances of transcultural warfare should be made. The first concerns the complexity of conditions on the military frontier of Christendom, where 'crusade and convivencia coexisted'.40 One reason for this complex picture was that such warfare attracted a steady flow of western knights, whether to defend the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, to participate in the Reconquista or to join a Reise into Lithuania. Here was a faint echo of the aristocratic diaspora that has been seen as the lifeblood of the 'core to periphery' movement discussed by Michael Prestwich in this volume.41 It is clear that such temporary injections of manpower muddied the water on the frontier. Christian armies would combine 'local' comprehension with the unfamiliarity, even naivety, of the new arrival. There would be tactical disputes as we see at Nicopolis in 1396, but also disagreements over how to treat the enemy. For example, we can easily imagine the -

-

-

The Mongols, pp. 1-2. See also Saunders, The History of the Mongol Conquests, pp. 8789. This has become a popular subject for counterfactual speculation: e.g. Cecelia Holland, "The Death that Saved Europe: The Mongols Turn Back, 1242", in What If?, ed. Robert Cowley (London, 2000), pp. 93-106. Dawson, Mission to Asia, p. xviii; Morgan, The Mongols, pp. 147-49. Denis Sinor, "Horse Pasture in Inner Asian History", in Denis Sinor, Inner Asia, chapter 2, especially pp. 181-83; Rudi Lindner, "Nomadism, Horses and Huns", Past and Present 92 (1981), pp. 3-19, especially pp. 14-16; Morgan, The Mongols, pp. 140-41. Cf. Charles Halperin, Russia and the Golden Horde (London, 1987), pp. 47-48. It has been pointed out that in 1241 the Czechs had mounted a successful resistance in mountainous terrain: Kosztolnyik, Hungary in the Thirteenth Century, p. 139. For the coexistence of acculturation and brutality on crusading military frontiers, see Norman Housley, "Frontier Societies and Crusading in the Late Middle Ages", Mediterranean Historical Journal 10 (1995), pp. 104-19. Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe. Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change, 950-1350 (London, 1993), chapter 2.

Morgan,

38 39

40

41

From Muhi to Mohâcs

incredulity of the

223

Knights

February 1329, when, at the insistence of King Bohemia, a newcomer Litauenreisen, the captured pagan defenders of Medvegalis were baptised rather than slaughtered or enslaved.42 At least the Teutonic Order welcomed zealous new recruits. The arrival of Crusaders in the Holy Land, keen to make a dramatic but inevitably destabilising gesture in justification of their John of

Teutonic

in

to

investment, was 'often far from welcome to the occupants of the Latin East, whose aims were more limited and more Beneath the busy surface detail of transcultural warfare on the frontiers of Christendom longer-term processes were at work. The shock of the new whether it involved intercultural or subcultural clashes of arms would gradually become blunted as a consequence of mutual acculturation, imitation and the fashioning of new responses. That methods of fighting, arms technologies and even personnel might be interchanged between the protagonists engaged in transcultural wars has often been commented upon.44 It has been argued that the Byzantine empire's extended life can be explained in part by a 'millennia-long willingness to enlist, and where possible, to imitate their foes'.45 In the Latin East, the 'turcopoles' represent an attempt to emulate, in equipment and methods, the lightly armed mounted archers of the Turks.46 The origins and development of the western European coat of plates should probably be traced to the influence of Islamic and Mongol armours, though this seems to have involved 'adopting a concept rather than directly copying' oriental exemplars.47 Together with imitation and adaptation, we should also note innovation. Once an opponent's modus operandi was understood, effective responses could be developed. For example, Lithuanian knowledge of the Teutonic Knights' institutional routine specifically that their general chapter was held in mid September influenced the timing of their raids 48 On occasion, we see the emergence of a distinctive kind of fighting man. In this volume, Michael Prestwich has drawn attention to the introduction

pragmatic'.43

-

-

...

-

-

As the Teutonic

Knights would have predicted, the Lithuanians apostatised at the first opportunity. Raymond Cazelles, Jean l'Aveugle, comte de Luxembourg, roi de Boheme (Paris, 1947), pp. 15758; Rowell, Lithuania Ascending, pp. 239-40. Christopher Marshall, Warfare in the Latin East, 1192-1291 (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 67-68. Denis Sinor notes that, for both Muslims and Christians, the Mongols were "unwelcome intruders bringing a new, disquieting dimension to the old, familiar conflict". Denis Sinor, "The Mongols and Western Europe", chapter 9, p. 516. For examples, see Helmut Nickel, "The Mutual Influence of Europe and Asia in the Field of Arms and Armour", in A Companion to Medieval Arms and Armour, ed. David Nicolle (Woodbridge 2002), pp. 107-25. Nicolle, "Medieval Warfare: The Unfriendly Interface", p. 581. See France, Western Warfare in the Age of the Crusades, pp. 219-20, for a judicious discussion. Nicolle, "Jawshan, Cuirie and Coats-of-plates", p. 221. Rowell, Lithuania Ascending, p. 245. In a variety of ways Catholic practices were "known well enough to enable the pagans to subvert or manipulate them": see Stephen Rowell, "Unexpected Contacts: Lithuanians at Western Courts, C.1316-C.1400", English Historical Review 111 (1996), ...

pp. 560-61.

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Andrew Ayton

of the English mounted archer (who dismounted to use his longbow) during the subcultural Anglo-Scottish wars. It might be added that this most versatile of combatants became a much sought after mercenary in other transcultural wars. That English archers can even be found serving in a garrison on the Hungarian-Ottoman frontier in southern Transylvania is less surprising than at first it appears to be, given the military and diplomatic contacts that existed between the kings and military communities of England and Hungary in the mid fourteenth century.49 To return to the Mongols: to respond effectively to the formidable military challenge that they presented, it was necessary not so much to beat them at their own game (which would scarcely be possible for a sedentary society), but rather to change the mles of the game. This happened at 'Ayn Jalut in 1260, where the Mongols met their match in the Egyptian Mamluks, who lured their adversaries onto an ideal battlefield and, taking advantage of superior archery and an informant in the Mongol ranks, destroyed them by means of a skilfully executed tactical envelopment by both wings of their army.50 Effective tactics were founded upon efficient military institutions. By 1260, the army of the Mamluk Sultanate was already on the way to becoming 'the most advanced military organisation of its age',51 which not only succeeded in containing the Mongol threat, but also ejected the Latins from their remaining outposts in Palestine and Syria. What made the army of the Mamluk Sultanate distinctive, by comparison with their western and Mongol opponents, was its employment of military slaves (mamluk='owned slave') who were drawn directly from the Kipchak steppe of southern Russia and central Asia and therefore retained 'the original fresh power of nomad or mountain dweller'. Having been selected for his physical attributes and separated from his blood relations and cultural roots at puberty, the mamluk acquired a new family his patron and his 'comrades in servitude' in the barracks and a new religion; and he received intensive training in close-quarters combat, mounted archery and formation manoeuvres. On passing out of military school, he gained manumission and joined an excellently equipped and well-mounted corps of professional soldiers.52 -

-

Johannes de Thurocz, Chronica Hungarorum, 1:182. Attila Bârâny, "The Communion of English and Hungarian Mercenaries in Italy", in The First Millennium of Hungary in Europe, ed. Klâra Papp, Jânos Barta, Attila Bârâny and Attila Györkös (Debrecen, 2002), pp. 126-40; Fritz Trautz, "Die Reise eines englischen Gesandten nach Ungarn im Jahre 1346", Mitteilungen des Instituts fur Österreichische Geschichtsforschung 60 (1952), pp. 359-68. For an acute analysis of the narrative sources for this battle, see Peter Thorau, "The Battle of Ayn Jalut: A Re-examination", in Crusade and Settlement, ed. Peter Edbury (Cardiff, 1985), pp. 23639. For a different 'battle reconstruction', relying on the author's astute assessment of the protagonists' tactical strengths, see Smith, "Ayn Jalut", pp. 326-28. France, Western Warfare in the Age of the Crusades, p. 234. The distinctive characteristics of the Mamluk system are outlined with great clarity in David Ayalon, Outsiders in the Lands of Islam: Mamluks, Mongols and Eunuchs (London, 1988), chapter 1, "Mamlukiyyat"; and David Ayalon, Islam and the Abode of War (Aldershot, 1994), chapter 2, "Mamluk: Military Slavery in Egypt and Syria". For an exemplary analysis of the military

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From Muhi to Mohâcs

tempting to explain the military successes of the Mamluk Sultanate by reference formidably efficient institutional structures. But it is important to recognise that the military school at the Cairo Citadel produced no more than a military elite, the Royal Mamluks. Without doubt it was a remarkable phenomenon. In striking contrast with the hereditary warrior aristocracies of medieval Europe, this military elite was constantly invigorated by 'an unceasing transfusion of new blood'. And it was certainly the 'backbone of the Mamluk army'. But to mount a major field campaign required much more manpower.53 For example, at the hard-fought battle of Horns in 1281, Sultan Qalawun had, in addition to 800 Royal Mamluks, 4,000 halqa troops, the Egyptian emirs' mamluks and various auxiliary contingents, of whom the Syrian bedouin and Turcoman light cavalry were particularly numerous.54 If we are to avoid simplistic judgements concerning the protagonists in this transcultural war, we must recognise that both the Mamluks and the Mongols employed large numbers of auxiliaries. It is perhaps remarkable that the Mamluk army achieved such consistent It is

to these

with so small an elite 'backbone', the battle of Wadi al-Khazindar, near Horns, in 1299, being 'the first and only major defeat ever experienced by the Mamluks at the hands of the Mongols'.55 It would seem that alongside the discipline and tactical professionalism of the mamluks and halqa troops was an effective system of command and control for the army as a whole, thus permitting exploitation of the auxiliaries' complementary military skills. If the army that the Mamluks were able to deploy against the Mongols has, in some respects at least, a modem appearance, we should not overlook the importance of logistics in shaping the course of the transcultural war between the Mamluk Sultanate success

institutions of the both the Mamluks and their Ayyubid predecessors, see Stephen Humphreys, "The Emergence of the Mamluk Army", Studia Islamica 45 (1977), pp. 67-91 (part 1); Studio Islamica 46 (1977), pp. 147-82 (part 2). For the training of the Royal Mamluks in the barracks (tibaq) of the Cairo military school, see Hassanein Rabie, "The Training of the Mamluk Faris", in War, Technology and Society in the Middle East, eds. Vemon Parry and Malcolm Yapp (London, 1975), pp. 153-63. For the long history of military slavery in the Islamic world, see Daniel Pipes, Slave Soldiers and Islam: The Genesis ofMilitary System (New Haven, 1981). Ayalon, Studies on the Mamluks of Egypt, chapter 1 : "Studies on the Structure of the Mamluk Army"; chapter 8: "The System of Payment in Mamluk Military Society". Robert Irwin, The Middle East in the Middle Ages. The Early Mamluk Sultanate, 1250-1382 (London and Sydney, 1986), pp. 66-67, where the "crucial role" played by the bedouin is noted. Our best source suggests that Qalawun had about 6,000 Royal Mamluks at the time of his death in 1290. The halqa troops the free-bom, non-mamluk cavalry were a highly effective force at the time of Horns, but due to land re-distributions in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, their military significance rapidly declined. The emirs' mamluks had "attended the military schools of their masters" rather than the first-rate facilities at the Cairo Citadel, and were consequently "less well trained" than the sultan's Royal Mamluks. Ayalon, Studies on the Mamluks of Egypt, chapter 1, pp. 222-28, 448-67. For the auxiliaries, see Ayalon, Islam and the Abode of War, chapter 7. Irwin, The Middle East in the Middle Ages, p. 100. -

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Andrew Ayton

and the Mongol Ilkhanate of Persia and Iraq. In the Middle East, the Mongols found that the terrain and climate imposed severe constraints on what had hitherto proven to be an unstoppable nomadic military machine.56 Lacking 'extensive permanent grassland', Syria was not the place for a massed, horse-bome army, and yet the Mongols found that they needed considerable numerical superiority in order to overcome the Mamluks, who outclassed them in equipment and tactical proficiency. In short, as John Masson Smith has argued, the Mongols 'could withstand neither the archery nor the shock weaponry of the Mamluks, except when using forces so large as to be logistically unsustainable' in that region.57 Consequently, the Mongols were themselves obliged to adapt their equipment and tactics to this new challenge. So, while the Russians, who endured lengthy contact with the Mongols, tried to copy the horse archery of the Golden Horde,58 the Mongols of the Ilkhanate under Ghazan Khan (1295-1305) attempted to imitate the Mamluks' high-volume archery and heavier, close-quarters combat equipment, while mounting their men on larger horses. That the Ilkhanate Mongols were not altogether successful in transforming their army was primarily because they were unwilling to adopt the Mamluks' system of military slavery that underpinned their formidable tactical proficiency.59 For sure, the Mongols were only too keen to use enslaved peoples as expendable 'cannon fodder' on the battlefield; but as the 'central and irreplaceable element' of a warrior society, how could the Mongols pass this pivotal role to military slaves?60 And yet the Mongols could not acquire the Mamluks' skills for themselves. That would have required a rigorous training regime that was an unrealistic proposition even for Ghazan Khan's guard, his kesig, let alone for the scattered nomadic manpower of the Mongol empire.61 The practical barriers to effective imitation in medieval transcultural warfare were never more strikingly demonstrated. To what extent did the Europeans succeed in developing an effective response to the Mongols? Having returned from his remarkable diplomatic journey to the Great Khan (1245-7), the Franciscan friar, John of Piano Carpini, offered clear military advice to See David Morgan, "The Mongols in Syria, 1260-1300", in Crusade and Setdement, ed. Peter Edbury (Cardiff, 1985), pp. 231-35; and Morgan, The Mongols, pp. 156-8, which stresses the importance of Ilkhanate-Golden Horde rivalry in preventing a full-scale invasion. Smith, "Mongol Society and Military in the Middle East", pp. 259-60. Nicolle, "Medieval Warfare: The Unfriendly Interface", p. 581, and sources cited there. Halperin, Russia and the Golden Horde, p. 91. Smith "Mongol Society and Military in the Middle East", pp. 260-66. Cf. the unsuccessful imitation of the heavy cavalry equipment and tactics of the Reconquista by the armies of alAndalus: Nicolle, "Medieval Warfare: The Unfriendly Interface", pp. 584-85. Dawson, Mission to Asia, pp. 36, 45; Smith, "Mongol Society and Military in the Middle East", p. 264. Recruited from the families of the existing Mongol warrior elite, the kesig resembled the royal households of medieval Europe rather than the "one generation" military elite of the Mamluk Sultanate. Smith, "Mongol Society and Military in the Middle East", pp. 264-65.

Front Muhi to Mohâcs

227

the leaders of

European armies. The essence of this was that they should imitate the equipment, organisation and methods of the Mongols, whilst avoiding the kind of tactical mistakes that simply played into their adversaries' hands.62 Having had plenty of opportunity to observe and leam from the Mongols, the Russians came to similar conclusions.63 Their success at Kulikovo Field in 1380, although something of a pyrrhic victory, was based upon a well chosen site where rivers and forests provided security for the

and flanks of their army, thus precluding the Mongols' classic encirclement manoeuvre. Piano Carpini would have given this a nod of approval,64 but what of the Russians' western neighbours? Is there any evidence that they too had learned from past mistakes? Of course, their contact with the Mongols after 1242 was no more than intermittent. Whether or not logistics played a part in this, the 'long series of wars' between the Golden Horde and the Ilkhanate of Persia and Iraq clearly demonstrate that the Horde's foreign policy was focused primarily on north-west Persia and the Caucasus rather than Europe.65 The Austrian chronicles suggest that when the Mongols did return to Hungary, in 1285, they did so with a vast army;66 but, in truth, given the structural changes experienced within the Mongol empire since Great Khan Ögedei's death, the invasion of 1285 can hardly have been on a scale to rival that of 1241. Nevertheless, in some ways the new Mongol assault unfolded in a familiar fashion. There was widespread devastation as the invaders penetrated as far as Pest. As in 12412, many Hungarians took refuge in castles, particularly in the mountains, and allowed the tidal wave to wash around them.67 What was different about 1285 was that there was no second Muhi. Indeed, the Mongols were ejected from Hungary, King Ladislaus IV having marshalled his field forces far more effectively than his grandfather, Béla IV, had his. Ladislaus avoided fighting the Mongols on the open plain, preferring to take them on in the hills.68 In short, he too was changing the rules of the game.69 That the rear

Dawson, Mission to Asia, pp. 43-50; Richard, "Les causes des victoires Mongoles", pp. 114-15. It may be noted in

passing that this gave rise to one of the more interesting examples of acculturation associated with later medieval transcultural warfare. Halperin, Russia and the Golden

Horde, chapter 9.

Halperin, Russia and the Golden Horde, pp. 55-56, 91; Dawson, Mission to Asia, p. 47. Morgan, The Mongols, pp. 141-44. Continuatio Vindobonensis, ed. Georg Heinrich Pertz, MGH SS 9 (Hannover, 1851), p. 713; Annales Sancti Rudberti Salisburgenses, ed. Georg Heinrich Pertz, MGH SS 9 (Hannover, 1851), p. 809. Due to an extensive programme of building after Muhi, by 1285 there were many more stone castles in the Carpathian basin: Fügedi, Castle and Society in Medieval Hungary, chapter 3, pp. 4748. Kosztolnyik, Hungary in the Thirteenth Century, pp. 285-87. The Polish chronicler, Jan Dlugosz, who is consistently hostile to Hungarian kings, states that Ladislaus was too afraid to face the Mongols in battle in 1285 (Ioannes Dlugossius, Annales 7-8:238), but he appears to have misunderstood a successful battle avoidance and scorched earth strategy. Although intended as a pejorative reference to his maternal parentage and supposed sympathies, Ladislaus's nickname, "the Cuman", may provide the key to understanding his success in 1285. He

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balance had shifted is suggested by the fact that, towards the end of his reign, Ladislaus was able to take Mongol contingents into his service. Thereafter, despite minor incursions under Khan Özbeg (1313-41), the Golden Horde posed no further serious threat to Hungary. Indeed, in 1345, a little over a hundred years after Muhi, Andrâs Lackfi, count of the Szeklers, marched over the Carpathians, defeated the Mongols and established Hungarian rule in what was to become

military

turbulent

Moldavia.70

III. The transcultural conflict triggered by the Mongol invasion of eastern Europe in 1241-2 was short-lived. Altogether more persistent was that which began with the Ottoman Turks' arrival in the Balkans in the 1350s. Marking the climax of the first phase of Ottoman expansion, the momentous clash at Nicopolis in 1396 offers a further example of how battle 'snap shots' can throw light on transcultural warfare and, in particular, on the otherwise poorly documented armies that were engaged in it.71 So decisive was the Ottoman victory at Nicopolis that we are tempted to assume that it had witnessed a onesided contest between very different systems of military organisation. And at first glance, what we do indeed see is a disorganised, polyglot crusader host, lacking an authoritative leader, routed by a finely-tuned military machine employing superior tactics in a coordinated fashion. But, as with Muhi, an awareness of the similarities between the protagonist armies at Nicopolis allows us to bring the areas of contrast into sharper focus.

had been a hilltop spectator of the battle of Dürnkrut in 1278, and in 1282 he had defeated a Cuman invasion at a battle near Lake Hod. Simonis de Kéza, Gesta Hungarorum, pp. 149-59; Kosztolnyik, Hungary in the Thirteenth Century, pp. 284-85. Johannes de Thurocz, Chronica Hungarorum 1:166; Engel, The Realm of St Stephen, p. 166. The classic study of Nicopolis is Aziz Atiya, Crusade of Nicopolis (London, 1934), which the author subsequently revised as chapter 18 of The Crusade in the Later Middle Ages, 2nd ed. (New York, 1965). Kenneth Meyer Setton, The Papacy and the Levant (1204-1571), 2 vols. (Philadelphia, 1976), 1: chapter 14, presents a critical evaluation of the sources for the battle. Nicopolis, 1396-1996. Actes du colloque international (Dijon, 1996) is a valuable collection of papers. David Nicolle, Nicopolis, 1396 (Oxford, 1999) is a well-judged, accessible account, which includes a fresh investigation of the battle site. For the Hungarian perspective, see Lâszlô Veszprémy, "Some Remarks on Recent Hungarian Historiography on the Crusade of Nicopolis", in The Crusades and the Military Orders: Expanding the Frontiers of Medieval Latin Christianity, eds. Zsolt Hunyadi and Jôzsef Laszlovszky (Budapest, 2001), pp. 223-30. Unsurprisingly, it is the Franco-Burgundian contingent in the crusader army that is most fully documented: see Bertrand Schnerb, "Le contingent franco-bourguignon à la croisade de Nicopolis", in Nicopolis, 1396-1996, pp. 59-74.

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tell, the armies of the protagonists at Nicopolis were of similar size of 10,000-20,000 fighting men each), though Bayezid I may have (in the region enjoyed a numerical advantage on the day of the battle.72 In terms of composition and recruitment methods, these armies had much in common. Both relied heavily upon military elites of equestrian warriors recruited by traditional methods. The greater part of Bayezid's cavalry at Nicopolis were the sipahis of Rumelia and Anatolia. These were holders of non-hereditary, military fiefs timars, which resembled the pronoias in the Byzantine empire and, indeed, the honors of Hungary.73 In King Sigismund of Hungary's army, the Franco-Burgundian contingent consisted mostly of heavy cavalry: in the region of 1,000 knights and esquires, with few archers or crossbowmen in support.74 But, as at Muhi, the Hungarians were able to field effective light cavalry and horse archers of their own, most notably the semi-nomadic Szeklers and the Wallachians. The polyglot nature of Sigismund's host is well known, but in terms of its ethnic and cultural heterogeneity the Ottoman army was not so very different. Both armies included Orthodox Christians, but while the Wallachians' allegiance was uncertain, the Serbs made a decisive contribution to Bayezid's victory.75 They were not the only Christians to fight in the sultan's army, since many of the timar-holding sipahis at Nicopolis had been drawn from the existing fief-holding warrior aristocracies of the newly conquered Balkans states. It is impossible to provide hard data for 1396, but we do know from a timar defter for 1431 that sixteen per cent of sipahis in Albania were non-Muslim.76 That Balkan Christians made so important a contribution to the Ottoman army in the later fourteenth century may be attributed to the pragmatic tolerance of the sultan. By contrast, the Hungarians tended to antagonise their Orthodox neighbours by urging conversion to Catholicism. As far

as we can

-

For judicious assessments of the evidence, see Setton, The Papacy and the Levant, 1:351-53; and Veszprémy, "Some Remarks on Recent Hungarian Historiography", pp. 226-27. As well, of course, as the iqta system of the Middle East. Gyula Kaldy-Nagy, "The First Centuries of the Ottoman Military Organisation", Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 31 (1977), pp. 147-83, here pp. 147-62; Imber, The Ottoman Empire, pp. 193-206; Mark Bartusis, The Late Byzantine Army. Arms and Society, 1204-1453 (Philadelphia, 1992), pp. 184-85; Engel, The Realm of St Stephen, pp. 151-53. Schnerb, "Le contingent franco-bourguignon", pp. 63-64. The Hungarian baronial banderia would also include heavily armoured mounted troops. The Wallachians (and Transylvanians) have often been accused of treachery, but probably unfairly: see Veszprémy, "Some Remarks on Recent Hungarian Historiography", pp. 225, 227. According to an eyewitness, Johann Schiltberger, it was the Serbs' attack at a critical moment that swung the battle in Bayezid's favour. The Bondage and Travels of Johann Schiltberger, a Native of Bavaria, in Europe, Asia and Africa (1396-1427), trans. Buchan Telfer, Hakluyt Society 58 (London, 1879) (hereafter cited as Schiltberger), p. 3. Bound to Bayezid by a dynastic alliance after Kosovo (1389), the Serbs had fought at Rovine in 1395 and remained loyal to the sultan at Ankara in 1402. Halil Inalcik, The Ottoman Empire. The Classical Age, 1300-1600 (London, 1973, repr. London, 1995), pp. 13-14, 114. Although timar holding was restricted to members of the military class (askeri), the Ottomans accepted that this included men of equivalent status in the conquered lands.

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Naturally, by 1396 the Hungarians and their local allies knew a good deal about the Ottoman way of war. Sigismund planned to open the battle with his Wallachian and Hungarian light cavalry, while the elite Franco-Burgundian heavy horse would be held in reserve to deal with their Turkish counterparts at the decisive moment.77 It was a sound plan, rooted in past experience of Balkans warfare. But Sigismund's army lacked the unity of purpose of their adversaries, and the Franco-Burgundians in particular would not defer to the Hungarian king's authority. Determined to lead the attack, as honour and their investment demanded, they displayed that fatal combination of bravado and poor judgement all too often encountered with newly arrived cmsaders, and rushed into the attack before the main body of the army could be deployed.78 At their approach, a 'cloud' of light cavalry, the akinjis, withdrew in good order to reveal a prepared position consisting of a hedge of sharpened stakes, backed up by foot archers. With many of their number forced to dismount or unhorsed by archery, the FrancoBurgundians fought on bravely, but were surrounded and overwhelmed. Sigismund, with the main body of the army, was unable to force a way through to them.79 'We shall lose the day because of the great arrogance and vanity of the French; if they had believed me, we should have had sufficient men to fight our enemies.'80 Sigismund's exasperation, as his army fell apart, is artfully conveyed in Froissart's words. By contrast, Bayezid's army at Nicopolis was notable for its cohesion and the effective tactical co-ordination of its complementary elements. This was no doubt in part because the sultan's tactics were very much according to traditional Ottoman methods, combining cavalry mobility with a well defended position on carefully chosen ground, and feigned retreats with envelopment from the wings. Such were Emir Orhan's tactics against the Byzantines at the battle of Pelekanon in 1328, and the

Schiltberger, pp. 2-3. Veszprémy has recently stressed Sigismund's "careful preparation and timing" of the whole campaign. Veszprémy, "Some Remarks on Recent Hungarian Historiography", pp. 223-26. This is the view of most chroniclers. Schiltberger, p. 3; Johannes de Thurocz, Chronica Hungarorum 1:214-15. Jean Froissart suggests that, owing to jealousies, the French high command was divided, but foolish counsel prevailed, and "par leur foie oultre-cuidance et orgueil fut toute la perte". Oeuvres de Froissart. Chroniques, ed. Kervyn de Lettenhove (Brussels, 1871), 15:312-16. Setton, The Papacy and the Levant, 1:348-53. According to Thuröczy, the Hungarians were not expecting the Franco-Burgundians to dismount and fight on foot, and were confused by the sight of stampeding, rider-less horses: Johannes de Thurocz, Chronica Hungarorum 1:215. For Sigismund's efforts, see Schiltberger, p. 3. By contrast, the biographer of Boucicaut tells a story of courage against impossible odds and betrayal, bitterly criticising the Hungarians for fleeing the field at the crisis point in the battle: Le livre des fais du bon messire Jehan le Maingre dit Bouciquaut, ed. Denis Lalande (Paris and Geneva, 1985), pp. 103-13. Cf. Setton, The Papacy and the Levant, 1:353-55. Lettenhove, Oeuvres de Froissart. Chroniques, 15:316.

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essentials remained the same at Nicopolis (and beyond).81 What of the military institutions that underpinned these tactics? The Ottoman army of the later fourteenth century is not well documented, but it is clear that what Bayezid had at his disposal in the 1390s was very different from the mighty military machine that Suleyman the Magnificent (1520-66) could call upon.82 The most important development of the fifteenth century (apart from growth in numbers) was the emergence of the sultan's permanent force of centrally trained, salaried soldiers, the kapu kulu ('servitors of the [palace] gate'), who were recmited by means of levies of Christian children from within the empire (devshirme). This formidable standing army numbered in the region of 20,000 men at the time of the battle of Mohâcs (1526) and provided a dependable, steely core to the sultan's colossal field armies, in the same way as the Royal Mamluks were in those of the Mamluk Sultanate. The elite infantry, the Janissaries, would play a crucial role at Mohâcs in 1526, as indeed they had done for Murad II at Varna in 1444.83 But having been established under Murad I (1362-89), essentially as a bodyguard, the Janissaries cannot have been present in large numbers at Nicopolis (there were no more than 2,000 at Kosovo in 1389).84 Also in the early stages of development indeed, perhaps not yet formed in 1396 was the mounted element of the kapu kulu, which during the fifteenth century would become six 'regiments' of household cavalry. At Nicopolis, therefore, Bayezid's elite troops amounted to a household contingent rather than a standing army. Yet, overall, his army was without doubt efficient and resilient, the latter quality having been demonstrated in the bloody engagements of Kosovo (1389) and Rovine (1395). By the 1390s, the Ottoman military machine had, in many respects, been put on a contractual footing, 'allowing the sultan to levy a predictable number of reliable troops year after year'.85 The timar system provided the bulk of the army's cavalry efficiently and economically, the sipahis being required to serve at their own expense for the duration a campaign, wherever it was fought. That a proportion of timar-holders (as high as 50 per cent in Albania in 1431) were military slaves of the sultan or the beys is likely to have contributed to the army's effectiveness. Moreover, the timar system functioned within a hierarchical administrative framework -

'

2

3

5

-

Imber, The Ottoman Empire, pp. 253-54, 256, 276-77; Vernon Parry, "La manière de combattre", in War, Technology and Society in the Middle East, ed. Vernon Parry and Malcolm Yapp (London, 1975), pp. 218-56. We should not forget that only six years after Nicopolis, Bayezid was the prisoner of Tamerlane,

his army having been destroyed at the battle of Ankara. For Tamerlane's army, see Beatrice Munz, The Rise and Rule of Tamerlane (Cambridge, 1991). Franz Babinger, Mehmed the Conqueror and his Time (Princeton, 1992), pp. 38-39. The bulk of the foot archers were presumably Azabs or "bachelors", irregulars recruited (at least, in the later fifteenth century) by selective conscription among the town and country-dwellers of the tax-paying, non-military class (re'aya). Imber, The Ottoman Empire, pp. 130-41, 256-58, 259-60. Kaldy-Nagy, "The First Centuries of the Ottoman Military Organisation", pp. 162-68. Imber, The Ottoman Empire, p. 257.

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mapped precisely onto the operational structure of the army and its chain of command.86 The sipahis of a particular village or locality were assembled by the ceribashi, who with his fellows gathered under the district governor, the subashi. Several subashis brought their retinues together under the banner of the regional military governor, the sanjak bey, who joined similar contingents under the command of the beylerbey or governor of a province Rumelia (Balkans) or Anatolia. So regular an organisational structure, preserving local and regional identities, yet allowing culturally diverse elements to come together under a common banner, can only have contributed to the cohesion and unity of purpose of the Ottoman army at Nicopolis, enabling them to prevail in a battle which, despite the rashness of the FrancoBurgundians, was a hard fought, sanguinary affair. 'When [Bayezid] saw that so many of his people were killed, he was torn by great grief, and swore he would not leave their blood unavenged'.87 This, according to an eyewitness, was the reason why so many of the Christian prisoners taken at Nicopolis were massacred by the Turks. Be that as it may, as Stephen Morillo notes in this book, the killing of prisoners was not unusual in transcultural warfare.88 The enemy was demonised and treated with brutal contempt, and warfare on the Hungarian-Ottoman frontier during the fifteenth century was conducted very much in this vein.89 After his victory at Gyulafehérvâr in 1442, Jânos Hunyadi sent a wagonload of Turkish heads to that

-

Buda, while Pal Kinizsi,

a man

of Herculean stature, is said to have celebrated his

triumph at Kenyérmezô in 1479 by dancing with the body of a dead Turk gripped in his teeth.90 But alongside such grisly spectacles may be detected other familiar characteristics of transcultural warfare, including the exchange of weapons technology, the imitation of fighting methods, and the formulation of innovative tactical, strategic and organisational responses. In the wake of Nicopolis, Sigismund responded to the military challenges posed by the Ottomans in various ways. A year after the battle, an attempt was made to reform Hungary's military institutions, with the establishment of the militia portalis. With the potential, in theory at least, to yield as many as 20,000 mounted archers, the militia portalis had no doubt been planned as a more effective counterpoise to the Ottoman army's strength in light cavalry (as the hussars, or 'marauders', recruited from among Inalcik, The Ottoman Empire, pp. 113-14; Imber, The Ottoman Empire, pp. 206-7.

Schiltberger, p. 4.

Morillo sees this as a feature of subcultural warfare in particular. Nicopolis involved the clash of 'Big Cultures' that had been in conflict for several centuries, and determining the viewpoint of the protagonists is complicated still further by the cosmopolitan nature of both armies. This important subject falls outside the scope of this paper. For two perspectives, see Erik Fugedi, "Two Kinds of Enemies Two Kinds of Ideology: The Hungarian-Turkish Wars in the Fifteenth Century", in War and Peace in the Middle Ages, ed. Brian Patrick McGuire (Copenhagen, 1987), pp. 146-60; and Norman Housley, Religious Warfare in Europe, 1400-1536 (Oxford, 2002), -

chapter 5. Held, Hunyadi: Legend and Reality, p. 87; Babinger, Mehmed the Conqueror and his Time, p. 376.

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Serb refugees, were later to be). However, it should be noted that in these measures as also in the Siena propositions of 1432-33 we see theoretical, rather than actual, well with of As as wrestling Hungary's longstanding recruitment dispositions troops.91 innovative had keen interest in a military technology. There is, for problems, Sigismund example, plentiful documentary evidence for his employment of gunpowder weapons from at least the 1410s.92 While not shrinking from confronting the Turks in person when necessary (with, it must be admitted, near disastrous results at Golubac in June 1428), his strategic outlook after Nicopolis was essentially defensive, based upon buffer states and the constmction of a chain of fortresses along the Danube from Tumu Severin to Belgrade.93 (The military challenge posed by the Hussites can only have reinforced the need for a cautious Balkans strategy.) By contrast, Jânos Hunyadi, the dominant figure in Hungarian military affairs during the 1440s and '50s, was an aggressive, even battle-seeking strategist with tactical tricks up his sleeve.94 First, the Ottomans' strength in light cavalry, which had proved so effective at Nicopolis, was countered by the effective tactical deployment of elite contingents of heavily armoured horsemen.95 Second, apparently learning from the Hussite wars, as well as from close study of 'classical' Ottoman tactics, Hunyadi brought wagon forts manned by handgunners to his Balkans battlefields. Such field fortifications provided much needed stability (and a refuge) to an army that relied heavily on cavalry shock tactics.96 In Hunyadi, the Ottomans had encountered a tmly formidable opponent who outfought them time and again in 1442-43. To understand how the Ottomans responded to these reverses, it is instmctive to examine the circumstances of Hunyadi's two great defeats. On both occasions he was heavily outnumbered and facing the main Ottoman army led by the sultan in person. And yet, at Vama (1444) he had gained the upper hand in the battle, only to have this advantage squandered by the foolhardiness of the young King Wladislas I.97 It was at the battle of Kosovo Polje (1448) that the Turks managed to re-impose their military superiority. On that occasion, the stability of the Ottoman line was founded upon a field fortification of chained wagons, backed up by -

-

91

92

93 94

95

96 97

The Laws of the Medieval Kingdom of Hungary, 2 vols., 2 (1301-1457):77-80, 141-53, 208-9, 24548. Lâszlô Veszprémy, "The Birth of Military Science in Hungary: The Period of the Anjou and Luxembourg Kings", in A Millennium of Hungarian Military History, ed. Lâszlô Veszprémy and Bela Kirâly (New York, 2002), pp. 26-53, here pp. 31-43. Engel, The Realm of St Stephen, pp. 231-38. Hunyadi also took advantage of the Ottoman military timetable, attacking their garrisons in the autumn after the main Turkish field army had been demobilised. Gyula Râzsô, "Military Reforms in the Fifteenth Century", in A Millennium of Hungarian Military History, ed. Lâszlô Veszprémy and Bela Kirâly (New York, 2002), pp. 54-82, here pp. 60-61. Held, Hunyadi: Legend and Reality, pp. 12, 81, 89, 130, 132. Johannes de Thurocz, Chronica Hungarorum 1:252-3; The Annals of Jan Dlugosz, ed. Maurice Michael (1997), p. 496; Held, Hunyadi: Legend and Reality, pp. 109-10; Babinger, Mehmed the Conqueror and his Time, pp. 38-39.

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handgun-wielding Janissaries. Hunyadi found himself locked into an attritional struggle that lasted two full days and into a third, and in these circumstances his numerically inferior army was unlikely to prevail. The Ottoman adoption of the wagon fort may have been a direct response to Hunyadi's methods, though we should not forget that it also represented a logical development of traditional Turkish tactics that had been successful at Nicopolis.98 What the Ottomans had undoubtedly learned during their Balkans campaigns was how to make the most of gunpowder technology. Exploiting the expertise of Serbs in their service, as well as the Mediterranean arms business, the Ottomans were employing firearms in siege warfare by the 1420s. Guns covered their passage of the Bosphorus in 1444 and were being deployed on the battlefield by the late 1440s.99 Foreign gunners and founders continued to serve as conduits for the transmission of technical knowledge under Mehmed II (1451-81) and later. For example, the huge guns that breached the walls of Constantinople in 1453 had been manufactured by a Hungarian founder, Orbân.100 Moreover, the battlefield experience of their European campaigns gave the Ottomans a decisive tactical advantage in their 'eastern' struggle with Uzun Hasan of the Akkoyunlu empire. According to a contemporary Venetian, at the battle of Baskent in 1473, 'the Turks prevailed, because the Persian cavalry were not accustomed to artillery battles'. A modem historian, wary of explanations that simplistically single out the role of 'firepower', would also stress the siting of the guns within a fortified camp, and the Ottomans' numerical and disciplinary advantages, all of which made their mounted counter-attack more effective when it was launched.101 The most notable (if short-lived) changes to affect the character of Hungarian field armies in the post Nicopolis period occurred under the mle of Jânos Hunyadi's son, Matthias Corvinus. The 'virtually regular, mercenary army' that Matthias established and maintained was a classic example of what John Lynn has termed an 'aggregatecontract' army.102 It was impressive in size, leadership and the quality of its War and the World, p. 30, which observes that "the notion of the wagon fort was familiar to the Turco-Mongols of Central Asia". 9 Djurdjica Petrovic, "Fire-arms in the Balkans on the Eve of and after the Ottoman Conquests of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries", in War, Technology and Society in the Middle East, eds. Vernon Parry and Malcolm Yapp (London, 1975), pp. 164-94; Kelly DeVries, "Gunpowder Weapons at the Siege of Constantinople, 1453", in War and Society in the Eastern Mediterranean from the Seventh to the Fifteenth Centuries, ed. Yaacov Lev (Leiden, 1997), pp. 343-62; Imber, The Ottoman Empire, pp. 268-75. 0 Veszprémy, "The Birth of Military Science in Hungary", pp. 43-45. ' Malipiero, quoted by Imber, The Ottoman Empire, p. 276. See also John Woods, The Aqquyunlu. Clan, Confederation and Empire, 2nd ed. (Salt Lake City, 1999), pp. 117-120; Black, War and the World, pp. 20-21. 2 The essential studies in English are Gyula Râzsô, "The Mercenary Army of King Matthias Corvinus", in From Hunyadi to Râkôczi: War and Society in Late Medieval and Early Modern Himgary, eds. Jânos Bäk and Béla Kirâly (New York, 1982), pp. 125-40; and Gyula Râzsô,

Imber, The Ottoman Empire, pp. 269-70. Cf. Black,

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and like the compaignies d'ordonnance established in Valois France in manpower; the 1440s, Matthias's units of mercenary cavalry and infantry were regularly structured and tightly disciplined. He was heavily reliant on foreign recmits (Czechs, Germans, Poles and Serbs), and one secret of the army's effectiveness seems to have been the synergy that resulted from the bringing together of complementary military skills. This, then, was a far cry from the chaos of mutual incomprehension and suspicion that had been seen at Nicopolis. Yet, it should always be bome in mind that Matthias's mercenary contingents formed only part, the substantial backbone, of his field armies, just as the Janissaries and the Royal Mamluks were in theirs. Matthias continued to make use of the banderia of the prelates and barons, and (sometimes) the general noble levy and militia portalis as well. This is very much the mix of military resources that fought under Jânos Hunyadi (and, indeed, Sigismund);104 but under Matthias the mercenaries played a pivotal role and there was a degree of permanence in the system that sprang from the king's absolute political authority and the tight grip that he maintained on Hungary's admittedly over-stretched tax revenues. Matthias Corvinus's 'mercenary army' was created under the shadow of the Ottoman threat, but it should not be viewed simply as a calculated response to that threat. If its inspiration may be found in classical models (and it should therefore be regarded as a dimension of the Hungarian Renaissance), its foundation can be traced to the aftermath of the Bohemian warlord Jiskra's submission to Matthias in 1462. Many of Jiskra's seasoned and now unemployed mercenaries were taken into the Hungarian king's service. Having begun life in circumstances of opportunity and necessity, Matthias's mercenary army was deployed infrequently against the Ottomans and most often in wars of conquest against Hungary's Christian neighbours in central Europe.105 For all his crusading rhetoric, Matthias strategic outlook and campaigning methods were very different from those of his father. Firstly, we should note Matthias's preference for

"Military Reforms in the Fifteenth Century", in Veszprémy and Kirâly, A Millennium of Hungarian Military Histoty, pp. 63-77. For John Lynn, see below, n. 127. There were reportedly 20,000 horsemen and 8,000 foot soldiers at the Wiener Neustadt review in 1487; but even if only half were Matthias's mercenaries, this must have represented one of the peaks of strength, since such numbers cannot have been sustained for any length of time by the tax revenues available to the Hungarian crown. Due to the unreliability of the Hungarian nobility, Hunyadi had usually supplemented his banderial familiäres with mercenaries financed from his own resources. The decree of 1454, for which Hunyadi was clearly responsible, outlines a framework of military institutions for Hungary that rested on a combination of mercenaries, banderia, and county-based contingents composed of the militia portalis and the lesser nobility. The Laws of the Medieval Kingdom of Hungary, 2 vols, 2 (1301-1457):125-29; 236-38. Held, Hunyadi: Legend and Reality, pp. 148-49, 166; Muresanu, John Hunyadi, pp. 74-75, 154-55. These campaigns have been variously interpreted: as pre-emptive strikes; as a way of ensuring domestic peace while keeping a restless military machine employed; as taking the line of least resistance in the pursuit of ambition; or as part of a grand strategy to establish a great central European power with resources sufficient to eject the Ottomans from the Balkans.

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strategies involving manoeuvre, siege warfare and the exploitation of opponents' logistical vulnerabilities, all of which suggest the influence of the writings of the late Roman writer on war, Vegetius. Consequently, his army's particular strength in light cavalry reflected not only the manpower and skills that were most readily available but also the kind of war that he intended to wage. Moreover, unlike his father, Matthias himself fought few battles. He was not prepared to risk everything by overplaying his hand. Titanic confrontations with the Ottomans were to be avoided.106 But if it was too late to tum back the clock in the Balkans, further Ottoman expansion might be resisted by a combination of diplomacy and well-maintained frontier fortresses, backed-up by occasional displays of political and military resolve. Matthias's army was the creation of his will, and since its maintenance rested upon an unsustainable tax burden, it would not long survive his untimely death in 1490. Thereafter, experienced soldiers permanently in the pay of the crown were few in number and confined to the garrisons on the southern frontier. In 1523, having been deployed in the field, these standing forces defeated a Turkish army under the sultan's brother-in-law at Szâvaszentdemeter. But the kingdom's military resources had deteriorated to such an extent since Matthias's death that the loss of perhaps 700 of these elite troops in that battle 'resulted in fears of the collapse of the whole defence system'.107 In fact, by 1523 that defence system, which was dependent upon the chain of frontier fortresses, had already been dealt a fatal blow. In 1521, Belgrade, which Sigismund had regarded as 'the pass and key to the kingdom of Hungary', had fallen to the Turks, and this serious reverse was compounded by further losses.108 When, after some delay, Sultan Suleyman launched a major invasion of St Stephen's realm in 1526 he was able to force a battlefield confrontation that resulted in the destruction of the main Hungarian army at Mohâcs. As with the battle of Nicopolis, establishing exactly what happened at Mohâcs is no easy task. The single Hungarian eyewitness account, written in the aftermath of the battle by Bishop Stephen Brodarics,109 has traditionally exerted a strong influence on historians.110 But Brodarics's testimony lacks an insider's understanding of military The Realm of St Stephen, pp. 301, 308. Andrâs Kubinyi, "The Battle of Szâvaszentdemeter-Nagyolaszi (1523), Ottoman Advance and Hungarian Defence on the Eve of Mohâcs", in Ottomans, Hungarians and Habsburgs in Central Europe, ed. Geza David and Pal Fodor (Leiden, 2000), pp. 71-115, quotation from Ferenc Szakâly, "Phases of Turco-Hungarian Warfare before the Battle of Mohâcs (1365-1526)", Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungarorum 33 (1979), pp. 65-111, here p. 105. Szakâly, "Phases of Turco-Hungarian Warfare before the Battle of Mohâcs", pp. 105-7. Stephanus Brodericus, De conflictu Hungarorum cum Solymano Turcarum imperatore ad Mohach historia verissima, ed. Petrus Kulcsâr (Budapest, 1985), pp. 47-57 on the battle. For Brodarics's political purpose, see Ferenc Szakâly, "The 1526 Mohâcs Disaster", The New Hungarian Quarterly 18 (1977), pp. 43-63, here p. 54. See, for example, Charles Oman, A History of the Art of War in the Sixteenth Century (London, 1937), pp. 649-65.

Engel,

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affairs. His narrative focuses on the actions of the magnates and on events that unfolded around him, which leaves the reader with a misleading impression of the engagement as a whole. Yet if we also draw on Ottoman accounts,111 some of the essentials of the battle become clear."2 The Hungarian horsemen, 'covered in armour from head to toe' (as the sultan's diary observes),"3 achieved a partial success against the Rumelian light cavalry, only to be brought to a halt by a wall of fire from entrenched artillery and (particularly effective) the Janissaries. Having lost momentum, and heavily outnumbered, the Hungarians were overwhelmed by familiar Ottoman tactics that combined a rock-solid defensive position with envelopment on the wings. The foot soldiers, including many mercenaries hired specifically for the campaign, stood their ground during the rout and were annihilated."4 The battle was over in a few hours. The Hungarian king, Louis II, was killed, together with many of his prelates and barons. Most of those captured during or after the battle were executed on the sultan's

orders."5

This summary of Mohâcs may suggest an engagement reminiscent of Nicopolis and there were indeed continuities in Ottoman military practice from the late fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries. But these two great battles were different in a number of respects, not least in the circumstances that gave rise to them. In 1526, the Hungarians faced an unenviable choice: avoid battle and allow the sultan's army 'to roam freely and ravage' the kingdom (an option favoured by Louis II), or fight a battle against overwhelmingly odds."6 That they chose battle has usually been attributed to the hotheadedness of the rank and file nobility, who were 'blinded by their eagerness to ...

111

For the narrative sources for Mohâcs, see Geza Perjés, The Fall of the Medieval Kingdom of Hungary: Mohâcs, 1526 Buda, 1541 (Boulder, 1989), pp. 173-75. Perjés is critical of Brodarics's testimony: e.g. concerning Hungarian deployment, the role played by the infantry and the contribution of the left flank (pp. 234-36, 255). Of the Ottoman narratives, the most useful are the sultan's diary and the accounts by Lutfi and Ferdi, while Kemal Pashazade and Djeladzade are less reliable (p. 242). The most important of the Hungarian, western and Turkish sources, including all of those mentioned here, have been brought together, in Hungarian translation in Mohâcs Emlékezete [In Remembrance of Mohâcs], ed. Kâroly Kiss et al. (Budapest, 1976). 112 Ferenc Szakâly summarised his interpretation in "The 1526 Mohâcs Disaster", pp. 47-48. See also Laszlo Altoldi, "The Battle of Mohâcs, 1526", in From Hunyadi to Râkôczi: War and Society in Late Medieval and Early Modern Hungary, eds. Jânos Bäk and Béla Kirâly (New York, 1982), pp. 189-202, which discusses the various interpretations of the evidence. 113 Kiss, et al, Mohâcs Emlékezete, p. 166. " According to Brodarics, the Hungarian army consisted of 24,000 or 25,000 men, with roughly equal numbers of horsemen (the banderia of the king, barons and prelates) and foot soldiers. Brodericus, De conflictu Hungarorum, pp. 47, 57. Perjés argues for considerably larger armies at Mohâcs: Perjés, The Fall of the Medieval Kingdom ofHungary, pp. 176, 223-24. 115 Perjés, The Fall of the Medieval Kingdom of Hungary, pp. 257, 259-61. 116 Perjés, The Fall of the Medieval Kingdom of Hungary, p. 73; Brodericus, De conflictu Hungarorum, p. 43. -

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in the vain expectation of victory'.117 The divisions and passions of the eve-ofbattle council meeting, and the triumph of those who were 'hell-bent on fighting', are powerfully conveyed in Brodarics's eyewitness testimony, though he adds, with justification, that a last-minute withdrawal in the face of an enemy strong in light horsemen was not, in any case, a practical option.118 Yet, as Géza Perjés has persuasively argued, there may well be more to this battle than first meets the eye.11 According to Perjés's interpretation of the evidence, the Hungarian commanders, Pâl Tomori (the martial archbishop of Kalocsa) and Gyorgy Szapolyai were in favour of battle because they had devised a tactical plan that offered some prospect of delivering a serious blow to Sulymann's steamroller-like advance. Fully aware of the size of the Ottoman army, they had chosen a battlefield that, as far as possible, neutralised their opponent's numerical advantage.120 Launching his attack when the sultan least expected it, Tomori hoped to defeat the Ottoman army piecemeal as they arrived in some disorder on the field, beginning with a bold pre-emptive strike on the leading contingent, the Rumelians, as they set up camp.121 Here was a return to the shock battle tactics perfected by Hunyadi, but such methods required perfect timing, tight discipline and more than a little good fortune. Tomori was not favoured by any of these prerequisites for success. His initial attack was delayed due, it seems, to untimely and unwitting interference by the king;122 and momentum was further dissipated by a bout of undisciplined looting in the Rumelian camp. The sultan had been let off the hook, and he was able to concentrate sufficient of his forces, especially his Janissaries, for weight of numbers and professionalism to count. Each of the subsequent Hungarian attacks was repulsed in tum by an army that had lost none of its legendary efficiency and discipline,123 and which all told numbered at least 70,000 combatants, plus auxiliary forces.124 Forming the backbone of this juggernaut were the sultan's

fight

-

117

Brodericus, De conflictu Hungarorum, pp. 43-44; Perjés, The Fall of the Medieval Kingdom of pp. 216-18. Hungary, 118 Brodericus, De conflictu Hungarorum, pp. 44-46; Perjés, The Fall of the Medieval Kingdom of Hungary, pp. 219-21. 119 Perjés, The Fall of the Medieval Kingdom ofHungary, pp. 221-22, chapters 8 and 9. 120 Ottoman deployment would be hampered by a comparatively narrow frontage and the need to descend a steep and probably slippery terrace in order to reach the Mohâcs plain. Perjés, The Fall of the Medieval Kingdom of Hungary, pp. 225-33. 121 "Since they had not formed battle lines yet, the Rumelian army was unable to resist", notes the sultan's diary. Kiss et al., Mohâcs Emlékezete, p. 166. 122 Brodericus, De conflictu Hungarorum, p. 53. Cf. Perjés, The Fall of the Medieval Kingdom of Hungary, pp. 245-49. 123 The efficiency of the army in 1526 is demonstrated, for example, by the rapid bridging of several wide rivers and the capture of a string of fortresses without significant delay. See Perjés, The Fall of the Medieval Kingdom of Hungary, pp. 21-42, 202-09. 124 According to Brodarics, Tomori estimated that there were 70,000 high-quality troops in the sultan's army, plus a mass of support personnel: Brodericus, De conflictu Hungarorum, pp. 44-45. -

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permanent units, the kapu kulu. A year later there were 8,000 Janissaries and 5,000 elite horsemen on the pay roll, and there were probably as many or more at Mohâcs.125 If

Nicopolis

it had been the

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superior organisation and capacity for co-ordinated action of the timar-holding sipahis that had given Bayezid the tactical edge, at Mohâcs it was the sultan's standing army of professional soldiers that stood firm against the Hungarian onslaught and won the battle. The Janissaries 'attacked the [Hungarians] three or four times, firing their arquebuses' notes the sultan's diary. They 'distributed bullets like a hailstorm', adds Kaman Pashazade.126 at

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IV. 'Between the age of the feudal army and that of the standing army, the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were the era of the contract army.' While not without merit as a summary, Bernard Guenée's broad bmsh stroke characterisation of the development of western European military institutions conceals a good deal.127 A greater reliance on paid, contractual service, followed by the emergence of permanent armies, may well be detectable as a pattern of development in some western European states from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries. But we should not ignore the fact that functioning military obligations and voluntary, paid service were often to be found operating simultaneously throughout the period. Moreover, the pace and character of change was far from consistent across Europe.128 Tum to the protagonists in transcultural warfare on the frontiers of Christendom, and further modifications to this particular model would appear to be necessary. For, as John Lynn has argued, 'Western ways of Cf. modem estimates: Szakâly, "The 1526 Mohâcs disaster", p. 44 ("60,000 to 70,000 disciplined soldiers"); Perjés, The Fall of the Medieval Kingdom of Hungary, pp. 26-38 (150,000 combatants). In the summer of 1527 there were 7,886 Janissaries (and 3,553 cadets), 5,088 horsemen of the six household regiments and 2,162 artillery men on the pay roll of the sultan's standing army. See Kaldy-Nagy, "The First Centuries of the Ottoman Military Organisation", pp. 167-69 and Rhoads Murphey, Ottoman Warfare 1500-1700 (London, 1999), Table 3.5, p. 45. Kiss et al, Mohâcs Emlékezete, pp. 166, 189. Bernard Guenée, States and Rulers in Later Medieval Europe (Oxford, 1985), p. 142. Cf. the medieval elements in John Lynn's taxonomy of "army style": (1) feudal army; (2) medievalstipendiary army; (3) aggregate-contract army. Lynn argues, however, that "diversity was at its peak in the Middle Ages", and explains variations by reference to a core-periphery model, in which "the core is not primarily defined by a geographical position but by a set of common, shared characteristics, and the periphery by variations from the core": John Lynn, "The Evolution of Army Style in the Modern West, 800-2000", The International History Review 18 (1996), pp. 50535. For surveys, see Philippe Contamine, War in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 1985), pp. 150-72; Andrew Ayton and Leslie Price, eds. The Medieval Military Revolution (London and New York, 1995), pp. 12-16; Maurice Keen, ed. Medieval Warfare: A History (Oxford, 1999), pp. 280-87.

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may be contrasted with the 'migratory horse peoples' of Central Asia and the 'slave soldiers' of Islamic societies'.1 9 This is sound enough as a generalisation, provided that we allow, firstly, for the 'cross over' of nomadic auxiliaries on the military frontier; and, secondly, that, to some extent, the arms technologies and styles of warfare of the protagonists in transcultural warfare and not merely those of the nomads and slave soldiers prompted imitation and innovation. If, as seems clear, the evolution of army style was a particularly complex process in those comers of Europe that experienced transcultural warfare, what of the idea that is often associated with the standard 'feudal to standing army' model of development, namely the shift from plurality to monopoly of violence? In France, for example, the establishment of a permanent army during the later fifteenth century had made it more likely that the state could achieve a monopoly of violence, and thus the demilitarisation of society. As Machiavelli put it, 'the king of France had disarmed his people in order to rule without violence'.130 Some of the protagonists in transcultural frontier wars were able to aspire to a degree of stability of manpower and control of military activity. The military orders offer obvious examples of this, though the limitations can be seen with regard to the Teutonic Order in Prussia and Livonia, where there was considerable reliance on a steady supply of western European volunteers (there were only about 1,200 brethren in the early fifteenth century), and much of the raiding was conducted by bandits (latrunculi) 'who were allied to either major protagonist but most loyally to themselves'.131 Transcultural military frontiers positively encouraged private enterprise: witness, for example, the almogavers of Aragon, those agile and resourceful light infantry 'whose pastoral and warlike style of life was lived out freely on the moving frontiers of the Christian and Muslim worlds', and who formed two-thirds of the Catalan company when, in 1303, it was hired by the Byzantine emperor to participate in his own transcultural conflict.132 Privatisation also characterised the defence of the king of Hungary's southern military frontier. Attempts to sub-contract sections of the frontier to the military orders met with little success. In 1225, Andrew II had been obliged to evict the Teutonic Knights from south-eastern Transylvania when they tried to establish an independent political entity, much as they were to succeed in doing in the Baltic region.133 In 1429 the Teutonic Order returned, this time to garrison thirteen frontier fortresses on the Danube between Belgrade and Tumu Severin, but following heavy defeats by the

constructing an army'

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129

130 131

Lynn, "The Evolution of Army Style", p. 508. Contamine, War in the Middle Ages, p. 249. Norman Housley, The Later Crusades (Oxford, 1992),

p. 340;

Rowell, Lithuania Ascending,

p.

245. 132

Contamine, War in the Middle Ages, pp. 247-48. The almogavers also served as marines in the Aragonese navy: see Larry Mott, "The Battle of Malta, 1283: Prelude to Disaster", in The Circle of War in the Middle Ages, eds. Donald Kagay and Andrew Villalon (Woodbridge, 1999), pp. 152-53. 133 Alan Forey, The Military Orders from the Twelfth to the Early Fourteenth Centuries (Basingstoke and London, 1992), pp. 34-35.

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they withdrew in 1434.134 Despite the efforts of efficient military administrators of the southern frontier (notably Filippo Scolari and the Talovac brothers) and, under Matthias Corvinus, the centralising of resources and command under three regional military officials, unitary control of a frontier that ran from the Adriatic to Transylvania was hardly achievable. Local commanders, who necessarily enjoyed a measure of autonomy, organised border raids.135 Even with his powerful mercenary field army at his disposal, Matthias did not achieve a 'monopoly of violence'. Of course, the Ottoman empire under Mehmed II (1451-81) and his successors possessed a formidable military machine, having unrivalled firepower at its disposal and with a standing force of Janissaries and elite cavalry at its core. But even in so centralised a system, there was an irregular component, the light cavalry akinjis of Rumelia, whose independent raids were wholly characteristic of the continuous kleinkrieg of the Danube frontier with Hungary.136 Ottomans

V. regard to the protagonists engaged in transcultural warfare during the medieval period, there was no clear trend from plurality to monopoly of violence. As others in this volume have noted, attempts to apply simple models of diachronic development to medieval warfare tend to run into problems. (An exception might be made for the shift from intercultural to subcultural warfare as the Middle Ages progressed.) Instead, I With

would like to propose a different kind of theoretical model that focuses on the armies engaged in transcultural wars. Originally devised as an analytical tool for the study of English armies involved in the Anglo-Scottish and Anglo-French wars of the fourteenth century, this model may also be applied to the functioning of armies employed in later medieval transcultural wars, not least in their battlefield encounters. The underlying rationale of the model is that the structural fabric of a medieval army, which was strongly influenced by the recmitment mechanisms that gave it life, shaped the way that it functioned. Most medieval armies were temporary assemblies, in being To view this episode from two different perspectives, see Engel, The Realm of St Stephen, pp. 23738 and Jürgen Sarnowsky, "The Teutonic Order Confronts Mongols and Turks", in The Military Orders: Fightingfor the Faith and Caringfor the Sick, ed. Malcolm Barber (Aldershot, 1994), pp. 260-61. Ferenc Szakâly, "The Hungarian-Croatian Border Defense System and its Collapse", in From Hunyadi to Râkôczi: War and Society in Late Medieval and Early Modern Hungary, eds. Jânos Bak and Béla Kirâly (New York, 1982), pp. 141-58; Géza Pâlffy, "The Origins and Development of the Border Defence System against the Ottoman Empire in Hungary (up to the Early Eighteenth Century)", in Ottomans, Hungarians and Habsburgs in Central Europe, ed. Geza David and Pal Fodor (Leiden, 2000), pp. 10-13. Imber, The Ottoman Empire, pp. 260-65.

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lacking the institutional structures of a permanent establishment. However, it is easy to overlook the fact that pre-existing social, tenurial or retaining ties between the leaders and their men, and between the men themselves, provided a degree of cohesion and structural robustness that compensated for the lack of 'standing' structures. To understand such an army to uncover what made it tick and to determine its distinctive features we must understand the topology and dynamics of the network of relationships that were created when it was recruited and which were crucial for its functioning in the field. Drawing on recent developments in network theory, it can be seen that the social network that was institutionalised, albeit temporarily, when an army was raised had an architecture dominated by major 'hubs' or foci. It was (to some extent) scale-free or 'aristocratic' in form.137 Viewed as a network, the army was a 'community of the mind' in which the leaders of the army's component units were the principal hubs around which lesser commanders and their companies clustered. Ideally, the hubs themselves were linked to each other by ties of shared status, while the connections between members of particular companies would often be based upon common geographical origins and mentalité, and perhaps shared military experience as well. It is not difficult, therefore, to find the 'primary group' that much discussed phenomenon of the German Wehrmacht in medieval armies.138 Viewing a medieval army as a social and institutional network offers two advantages. First, it enables us to visualise the structure of the army and the connections between its parts in a way that is faithful to reality. Presenting the structure and composition of an army in tabular form, as a list of elements, may be convenient, but it will probably fail to convey the personal ties and spatial relationships between the component units of the army and between the personnel that made up those units. Second, and more importantly, an appreciation of the topology and collective dynamics of a 'small world' network helps us to understand how an army functioned as a military machine and as a social and political organism. On the one hand, the social and institutional network that underpinned the army offered channels of communication whereby opinions concerning immediate military matters as well as broader political for

only months or even weeks

and

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issues were distributed. Viewed in this way, an army could be a forum for debate. This could have militarily damaging consequences if it lacked authoritative overall leadership, as we see, for example, with the crusader host at Nicopolis.

The characteristics of scale-free, or "aristocratic", networks were first described as recently as 1999, with general dissemination occurring in 2002. See Alberto-Laszlo Barabâsi, Linked: The New Science of Networks (Cambridge, Mass., 2002); cf. Science 286 (1999), pp. 509-12. It has been pointed out that, in practice, since every network is finite, none can be truly scale-free in form. For this and other observations, see Duncan Watts, Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age (London, 2004), pp. 104-14. For the primary group, see Edward Shils and Morris Janowitz, "Cohesion and Disintegration in the Wehrmacht in World War II", Public Opinion Quarterly 12 (1948), pp. 280-315 and Orner Bartov, Hitler's Army. Soldiers, Nazis and War in the Third Reich (Oxford, 1992), chapter 2 and references cited there.

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The

topology of an army's underlying network had a more direct role to play in that army's military function. Effective combat was essentially a team activity. Where possible, men fought co-operatively in groups, and what counted most were the bonds of mutual tmst based perhaps upon a shared locality of origin or, better still, upon longstanding comradeship in arms. The clusters of individual relationships within the social network of a military community were, therefore, the foundation upon which successful battlefield performance could be built: they gave the army strength and cohesion. But networks based upon personal relationships are not without potential weaknesses. In the first place, the network would not hold together if the bonds between an army's captains, the hubs, were weak or non existent. Herein lies a significant difference between the protagonist armies at Nicopolis (and, in all likelihood, Muhi as well). On the one hand, the component parts of Sigismund's army were discrete, mutually uncomprehending entities, between which meaningful communication was difficult. Thus, although the Franco-Burgundian contingent of heavy cavalry was a tightly organised, cohesive force, which may well have fought in a disciplined fashion, and initially successfully (as Marshal Boucicaut's contemporary biographer insists),139 it was nevertheless wholly detached from the rest of Sigismund's army. As far as we can tell, there were no overarching institutional mechanisms for the crusader host as a whole. There were no ordinances for the regulation of discipline, such as we find operating in western Europe at this time;140 and (as Jean Froissart relates in a telling anecdote) the orders of the Hungarian king, delivered by his marshal, were brusquely rejected by the count of Eu, constable of France.141 The contrast with Bayezid's host could hardly be greater. For, as we have seen, not only were the sipahis, the timarli cavalry, bound together by 'primary groups' and regional recruitment, the direct correspondence of provincial administrative and army stmctures also ensured that there was a regular and dense institutional network underpinning the Ottoman army. This was a network in which the small clusters, the primary groups, were clearly connected to the hubs, while the hubs were tightly linked to each other and to the supreme army command. The effectiveness of these control mechanisms

the

legendary discipline on their orderly, disciplined debauchery. comment

of the Ottoman

can be seen in machine: military contemporary observers free of drunkenness and encampments,

As with all scale-free networks, a medieval army's hubs, its principal captains, were both a source of strength and also its Achilles heel. For while the hubs were the focal points for large sections of the army, its command centres and rallying points, their removal could cause structural collapse. Lacking an institutional structure that was

Lalande, Le livre des fais, pp. 103-13. For recruitment, see Schnerb, "Le contingent francobourguignon", pp. 64-65. See, for example, Maurice Keen, "Richard IPs Ordinances of War of 1385", in Rulers and Ruled in Late Medieval England, eds. Rowena Archer and Simon Walker (London, 1995), pp. 33-48. Lettenhove, Oeuvres de Froissart, Chroniques, 15:313-14.

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wholly independent of its personnel, a typical western-European medieval army was held together by the social authority and resources of its principal commanders and their personal relationships with their men. The contractual ties were personal. Consequently, the neutralisation of a major commander would cause his contingent to fragment into smaller units and a crowd of individuals. In a battle in which an army's leading commanders, the hubs in the network, were killed or otherwise neutralised, there would be little to prevent the army from disintegrating. As Thuröczy notes, 'It very often happens that when a leader falls, all those he led also fall'.'42 At Varna, the death of King Wladislas I had a devastating effect on Hunyadi's army, which against the odds had almost won the battle. At Mohâcs, so heavy were the losses among the Hungarian army's leaders, there can have been few banderia that were unaffected.143 Since an adversary's command centres on the battlefield would be readily identifiable from the banners that accompanied them, targeting them would not be difficult. While instances of this tactic are commonly encountered in western warfare, it is clear that the Mongols and Ottomans placed particular emphasis on neutralising their opponents' command centres.144 For example, Dlugosz relates how, at Legnica, the Mongols identified the Polish leader, Henry, duke of Wroclaw, by his heraldic insignia, and pursued him relentlessly until he was brought down and slain.145 Similarly, Thuröczy reports how, during the battle of Gyulafehérvâr (1442), the efforts of an elite Ottoman contingent tasked with killing Hunyadi were foiled because the Hungarian leader, hearing of the plan, employed a double who was indeed killed in the melee.146 On occasion, it was enough to bring down the leader's standard. Schiltberger relates that Sigismund abandoned the field of Nicopolis when he saw that his banner had been overturned.147 Similarly, the capture of Uzun Hasan's imperial standard marked at the end of Aqquyunlu resistance at Baskent.148 With the protagonists in late medieval transcultural wars in the spotlight, it can be seen that the topology and dynamics of the 'network model' of medieval armies highlight strengths and weaknesses, similarities as well as contrasts. Whereas westernstyle contract armies lacked permanent, overarching institutional structures, or were only gradually acquiring them, examination of the armies of their 'eastern' opponents reveals functioning networks with reinforced bonds. In some cases, the strength stemmed from a higher level of permanency and the virtues that resulted from intensive training and a barracks life-style. Here we have institutional structures and 'primary -

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142

Johannes de Thurocz, Chronica Hungarorum, 1:246. For the casualty list of Hungarian leaders, see Brodericus, De conflictu Hungarorum, pp. 56-57. 144 Aware that western leaders often led by example, John of Piano Carpini advised that, against the Mongols, they "ought on no account to take part in the battle, just as the Tatar chiefs take no part, but they should watch the army and direct it". Dawson, Mission to Asia, p. 46. 145 Ioannis Dlugossii, Annales, 7-8:23. 146 Johannes de Thurocz, Chronica Hungarorum, 1:245-6. 147 Schiltberger, p. 3. 148 Woods, The Aqquyunlu, p. 120. 143

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groups' that resemble those of a standing army: the Royal Mamluks, with their allegiance to the barracks in which they had trained in the Cairo Citadel;149 and, similarly, the Janissaries serving in their ortas. But, as we have seen, such permanent units never formed more than the elite core of armies that were hybrid in character and composition. They cannot have been wholly responsible for the victories that the Mamluk and Ottoman armies achieved. The robustness of the bonds that held together the Ottoman army as a whole appear to have stemmed from a different kind of institutional framework. The timar system had some resemblance to the forms of lordship that were so important to the recmitment and functioning of western armies of the 'feudal' and 'contract' phases; but its strength seems to have rested on the fact that the hierarchical administrative framework of the empire mapped precisely onto the operational stmcture of the army and its chain of command. And, at the time of Nicopolis, the timar system in the Balkans had the vitality of a recently established institution. The Mongol military machine was very different. Here was a people in arms, the ultimate case of a society organised for war, upon which had been superimposed a regular organisation and a draconian disciplinary regime. When John of Piano Carpini argued that in order to resist the next nomadic onslaught it would be necessary for western polities to imitate their way of making war, he included the adoption of the Mongols' decimal system of military organisation.150 This was, of course, an unrealistic proposal, given prevailing social and military structures in thirteenth-century Europe. We are reminded here of the Ilkhanate Mongols' efforts to imitate the tactics and equipment of the Mamluks without adopting their system of military slavery. When a new kind of regular army did begin to emerge in the West from the mid fifteenth century an army in which permanent stmctures existed independently of the service of individual soldiers this was not influenced by contacts with nomadic societies, nor indeed by the distinctive Islamic institutions of military slavery. There may have been some recognition that one of the Ottoman army's sources of strength was the underpinning of personal ties by institutional and administrative stmctures, but that was all. Just as the distinctive military stmctures of the Mamluk Sultanate sprang from the fertile soil established by the last of their Ayyubid predecessors, albeit through 'a series of responses to specific historical situations and to a changing socio-political context',151 so the 'aggregate-contract' armies that emerged in France and the major Italian city states, followed by Burgundy and Hungary, were products of their own political and cultural contexts. In fact, they were more 'the fruit of circumstances than -

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150 151

Ayalon, Studies on the Mamluks of Egypt, chapter 8, p. 46. Dawson, Mission to Asia, pp. 43-49. Richard Stephen Humphreys, "The Emergence of the Mamluk Army", Studia Islamica 45 (1977), p. 69. This article concludes (p. 99) that Al-Salih Ayyub (d. 1249) created "the preconditions, both institutional and psychological for change", that is, for the emergence of the "classic" Mamluk army.

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of clearly formulated decisions on the part of the authorities'.152 There was opportunism and pragmatism (as we see, for example, with absorption of unemployed mercenaries), as well as imitation of local neighbours and rivals. And it was widely recognised that long-term maintenance of the new military institutions would depend upon efficient fiscal systems. But above all, the particular form that the new 'aggregate-contract' armies took reflected social, cultural and political conditions within Christendom, including the character of available manpower. This was as much the case in the Hungary of Matthias Corvinus, which shared a frontier with the Ottoman empire, as it was in Burgundy or the Italian city states. Matthias, as we have seen, was influenced by the example of Italy, classical and modem, and he drew heavily on the well-stocked pool of central European mercenaries. He might occasionally need to confront Mehmed IPs army on the Danube, and he was certainly aware of his adversary's strengths and weaknesses, but there is no evidence of institutional imitation, conscious or otherwise. If what John Lynn has termed 'paradigm armies' are to be identified in the sphere of later medieval transcultural wars,153 their influence operated, in the main, within 'Big Cultures'. In intracultural and some forms of subcultural warfare, the shared characteristics of the protagonists, and the consequent relative ease with which a temporary military advantage could be blunted by imitation, would give rise to convergence. Armies would become 'mirror-images of each other', with the prospect of a 'symmetrical operational dynamic' and attritional stalemate.154 It was different in transcultural war. Arms technologies might be interchanged between transcultural protagonists, and sometimes methods of fighting too, though the success of such a transfer may depend upon the willingness and capability of the recipient to adopt the key characteristics of the socio-military organisation of the exemplar. That was not always possible: witness, for example, the struggle that the Hussites' opponents had in coming to terms with the Bohemians' distinctive fighting methods. This brings us to the essential point. Major developments in 'army style' were unlikely to occur through the imitation of transcultural rivals, because military institutions, from foundation to extinction, were fundamentally rooted in specific social, cultural and political contexts. -

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Contamine, War in the Middle Ages, p. 168. In fairness, Lynn notes that "it would be hard to identify a paradigm for most of the Middle Ages, when diversity was at its peak". Perhaps we should be thinking in terms of regional paradigms or "paradigmatic elements". Lynn, "The Evolution of Army Style", pp. 510-11. See also Jeremy Black's criticism of Lynn's Eurocentric approach and paradigmatic model: Jeremy Black,

"Military Organisations and Military Change in Historical Perspective", Journal of Military History 62 (1998), pp. 871-93, here pp. 874-77. Dennis Showalter, "Caste, Skill and Training: The Evolution of Cohesion in European Armies from the Middle Ages to the Sixteenth Century", The Journal of Military History 57 (1993), pp. 407-30, here p. 420, citing, as an example, the warfare of mercenary companies in later medieval Italy. Cf. the Napoleonic wars, when France's adversaries successfully mimicked her army structures and operational technique, for which see Robert Epstein, Napoleons Last Victory and the Emergence of Modern War (Lawrence, Kansas, 1994).

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The Ottoman experience illustrates this well. While built on the existing structure of military fiefs in the Balkans, the timar system was a natural descendent of the Islamic iqta. Similarly, the kapu-kulu corps was but a well-documented example that longstanding, distinctive feature of Islamdom military slavery. But if we shift our gaze to the period of military decline in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, we find that while the Ottomans could keep abreast with developments in arms technology, they 'n'ont rien changé dans leur tactique, depuis le grand Soliman'.155 As Vernon Parry has noted, 'The psychological barrier between the borrowing of a musket and the borrowing of a tactical formation was formidable. To cross the barrier meant to reshape the Ottoman armies in a radical manner and, indeed, to re-fashion the Ottoman state itself.156 Due to such 'barriers', effective military responses in the transcultural sphere usually involved not so much beating an adversary at his own game, as changing the rules, if not the game itself. It is tempting to regard this as 'innovation', as opposed to -

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the 'imitation' that is often encountered in intracultural wars. But, in many cases, what actually was taking place was accelerated movement along an existing path of development, or a push to realise the potential of an asset whose developmental seeds had already been sown. This much though not their toxophilite techniques the Royal Mamluks of Egypt and mounted archers of Edwardian England had in common. -

Charles Emmanuel de Warnery, Remarques sur le militaire de Turcs p. 12, quoted by Parry, "La manière de combattre", p. 256. Parry, "La manière de combattre", pp. 225-56.

-

(Leipzig and Dresden, 1770),

Daniel Höhrath

Soldiers and Mercenaries, Protagonists in Transcultural Wars in the Modern Ages

I. give a short overview of the protagonists of transcultural wars in the last 500 years sounds like being given the task of putting the entire military history of the modern era in a nutshell. All that can be achieved in this contribution is merely the attempt to sketch a few basic developments and problems. It should first of all be stated that the author is considering the matters from the viewpoint of a historian specialising in European military history of the early modern era. The present global uncertainties have given a new relevance to the question of the character of war in the future. It is to be expected that wars will no longer be fought between the technologically and economically leading 'modern' great powers, but instead between and within less 'developed' societies or between these and the modern military powers. It is noticeable here that, in contrast with a few years ago, a new dignity and prognostic relevance is awarded to the historical perspective, because apparently patterns are recognizable which appear to be known from pre-modern times. Consulting military history for these questions, however, is often done on an extremely thin basis of knowledge of military history which is often extremely capriciously, or at least selectively, interpreted. ' The fact that the manner in which societies wage war is dependent on cultural character and influences has recently become a central theme in modern military historiography.2 In this, belligerent collisions of culturally different opponents are not only of particular analytically interest. It is frequently assumed that transcultural wars To

2

Martin van Creveld, The Transformation of War (New York, 1991); German edition published as: Die Zukunft des Krieges (München, 1998). Jeremy Black, War in the New Century (London, 2001). Herfried Münkler, Die neuen Kriege (Reinbek, 2002). Andreas Herberg-Rothe, Der Krieg. Geschichte und Gegenwart (Frankfurt a. M., 2003). One of the most stimulating recent studies on the theme is: John A. Lynn, Battle. A Histoiy of Combat and Culture. From Ancient Greece to Modern America (Boulder, 2003).

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tend to be waged particularly fiercely. Thus, for instance, the lack of common cultural forms can show itself in such a way that violence-limiting rules and codes are not known or not observed by either side and that transcultural wars demonstrate a tendency to escalate and become total. On the other hand, a particular closeness between the warring factions, as is the rule in internal conflicts or 'civil wars' appears to be precisely what produces the greatest measure of brutality and intention to destroy. The analytical value of the term 'transcultural war' depends at least partly on the question of what can in fact be determined as historical experience. The connecting question of my short contribution is a different one, but one which likewise aims at the basis of the discussion of transcultural war: It concerns the question if and when a significant difference can be established between the protagonists of war in the shared cultural framework of western or central European societies and the protagonists in transcultural wars.

II. Some defining remarks should be stated as a preliminary: By protagonists, two groups of actors at different levels should be understood. First of all, those at whose command, in whose name and for whose political and other aims a war is waged i.e. the military and political leading classes of the society concerned. In this instance we are in the habit of speaking of the 'state'. In this case, however, not only in the light of the relevant timeframe non-state protagonists also need to be taken into account. Secondly we need to understand those who actually wage war. This means military organisations in general as well as individuals who bear the burden of war i.e. the soldiers who are actually fighting, not forgetting the non-combatants attached to armies as well as the special groups of'irregular' combatants: militia, partisans and guerrillas. For the purposes of this article the term 'transcultural war' requires likewise its own working definition. The following categories, which should in no way be understood as an attempt at a valid typology, might help to limit the subject under observation while highlighting the problems involved in this terminology. The first and most easily definable group of transcultural wars are the wars of Europeans (or societies based on European roots) against non-European enemies outside Europe: The typical examples for these are the so-called 'colonial wars' i.e. the armed conflicts between Europeans and non-Europeans in the context and as a consequence of European expansion overseas. In particular, when the military clash represented if not exactly the first, but nonetheless the most severe cultural contact up to that point, it is quite clearly a transcultural war. This applies for instance to the -

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Protagonists in Trans-Cultural Wars in the Modern Era

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Spanish Conquista

of the 16 century or the clashes of the colonial powers with hitherto 'unknown' peoples of Africa as late as the 19th century.4 However even after previously long-lasting contacts with peaceful and belligerent phases, we can refer to transcultural wars, such as between the British colonial rulers and the regional potentates in India. Finally, even the Japanese-American war as part of the Second World War can be categorized in this way. The second group is represented by wars on the borders of Europe, or in the areas which at the relevant time were influenced by Christianity and Europe, against societies with different cultures. The 'Turkish Wars' against the Ottomans in the early modern era spring to mind first of all.5 But in this group we can also classify wars against 'inner-European' opponents, which at least at a particular period were not (yet) adapted to the western European pattern, such as the highland Scots up to 17466 or even the irregular parts of the Russian Armies up to the time of the Napoleonic Wars.7 A fundamental difficulty in the definition of'transcultural war' is clear when cultural difference between societies is not accepted as an objectively-justified fact but only historically from the particular discourses of the opponents. This extends the field considerably: Wars between European opponents with cultural roots in common have been interpreted by contemporaries as 'transcultural wars' before the term existed, when one side implied that the other's culture was different or both sides claimed to be different from each other, be it from ideological, social or political motives. This applied for instance to a certain extent to the religious civil wars of the 16th and 17th centuries or the wars between the powers of the Ancien Régime and the French Revolutionary Republic. Ideologically-justified cultural conflict which is incited by propaganda has practically become a predominating motive in the 'race', 'class' and 'ideological' stmggles of the world and civil wars of the 20th century. For wars between non-European opponents from differing cultures, i.e. without at least one 'European' party, the categories mentioned above can also be used for classification; the present state of research, however, is scarcely sufficient for this, so in this context cannot be taken into account.8

4

5

6 7

8

See Ross Hassig, "War, Politics and the Conquest of Mexico", in War in the Early Modern World, ed. Jeremy Black (London, 1999), pp. 207-235. See Bruce Vandervort, Wars of Imperial Conquest in Africa, 1830-1914 (London, 1998). See Gâbor Âgoston, "Ottoman Warfare in Europe 1453-1826", in European Warfare 1453-1815, ed. Jeremy Black (London, 1999), pp. 118-144, 262-263. See James Michael Hill, Celtic Warfare 1595-1763 (Edinburgh, 1986). See Brian L. Davis, "The Development of Russian Military Power 1453-1815", in European Warfare 1453-1815, ed. Jeremy Black (London, 1999), pp. 145-179, 264-268. A short overview of wars outside Europe without European participation has been attempted for instance by Jeremy Black: Jeremy Black, Warfare in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1999). Cf. also Jeremy Black, ed., War in the Early Modern World 1450-1815 (see above, n. 3)

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III. One of the main objects of the present discussion about the 'future of war' is the unsettling observation that the state is appearing to lose its role in holding the monopoly on belligerent violence.9 If the modem state is interpreted as the western 'model of success', which is clearly rooted in culture, the asymmetric process of denationalisation means at the same time that new cultural lines of conflict are

emerging. From the perspective of a medieval historian or an early modem historian, the modem state is an extremely young phenomenon, whose genesis was not a necessity of nature for which there would have been no alternatives.10 A somewhat more open view on history than that which is customary in a political journalism concentrating on the present allows the idea of forms of war without state involvement to be seen as far less exotic and surprising. The close connection between the modem state and modem military affairs cannot be denied." Both of them developed at the same time and each appears to be unthinkable without the other. Whether this connection is always necessary is still to be asked. First of all, we will look at that prolonged modem fundamental process in which, in Europe, armies became institutions of the state. It can be justly claimed that, before that, there were everywhere 'non-state participants' and there was no 'state' monopoly on the use of force; although the approximate time from when princely power is to be regarded as 'state' is open to discussion. When the existence of a legitimate organized power with a fairly realistic claim to a monopoly on the use of force can be regarded as a hallmark of statehood, then this should be established at an early moment. On the other hand, when the unity of territory, people and monopolized state power is regarded as the property which constitutes a state, then even in the 18th century and later were there no states in the modem sense of the word. Thus the political dealing of early modem dynasties, with their inheritance struggles, the distribution of territories among successors, and the swapping of countries and assets resemble family-owned multinational corporations more than states. Likewise the multitude of particular rights and privileges to which various social groups, each different in their regional and local contexts, were entitled within the early modem power structure cannot be interpreted as a state in the modem 9 0

1

See above, n. 1 and Martin van Creveld, The Rise and Fall of the State (Cambridge, 1999). Wolfgang Reinhard, Geschichte der Staatsgewalt. Eine vergleichende Verfassungsgeschichte Europas von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart, 2nd ed. (München, 2000). The close link between military history and constitutional history has an important tradition in German research. See Bernhard R. Kroener, '"Das Schwungrad an der Staatsmaschine?' Die Bedeutung der bewaffneten Macht in der europäischen Geschichte der Frühen Neuzeit", in Krieg und Frieden. Militär und Gesellschaft in der Frühen Neuzeit, eds. Bernhard R. Kroener and Ralf Proeve (Paderborn, 1996), pp. 1-23.

Soldiers and Mercenaries,

Protagonists in Trans-Cultural Wars in the Modern Era

253

sense of the term. The state as an abstract subject of international law and as a modern administrative state, which has an effect on the population without intermediary forces and where there is an aimy as an integrated institution, only became reality around the middle of the 19th century. Nonetheless a relatively small group of noble potentates were able, in the early modem era, to divide early modem Europe to a great extent among them. They succeeded in bringing large territories under their sway, by repelling intermediary forces (cities, Landstände) and in establishing their power by forming long-lasting institutions. Securing their domestic domination (which can also be regarded as a process of state formation) along with the aspirations to expansion and the rivalry towards outsiders, were connected to the heavy deployment or at least the permanent threat of armed force. The term 'Staatsbildungskrieg' has become widespread for these events in recent years.12 They culminated in the 17th century in the Thirty Years' War and other contemporary conflicts in Western Europe. The prerequisite for this intensification of power was the availability of military instmments of power. The expansion and consolidation of power made possible increases in finance, materials and staff for waging war; these in tum ensured the power of the potentates. The development from 'private' to 'state' war is sketched below in three phases using very broad brushstrokes and unavoidable generalisations: the period of the mercenary contractors, of regular mercenary armies, and of armies of nation states.13 From the 15th century up to around the middle of the 17th century we can talk about the period of military contractors. The system operated like this: Troops were deployed according to need and demobilized again, after the campaign or war was over. The potentates made contracts with individual mercenary contractors, who as colonel mercenaries, recmited on the open market and then hired themselves out with complete units as 'warlords' to interested potentates. A dangerous, but nonetheless profitable business, which could also open doors for social climbing.'4 The mercenary contractors were usually responsible for the complete process of recmiting and training, equipping, arming and providing supplies; however individual -

-

12

13

14

Johannes Burkhardt, "Die Friedlosigkeit der Frühen Neuzeit. Grundlegung einer Theorie der Bellizität Europas", Zeitschriftfür Historische Forschung 24 (1997), pp. 509-574. Works providing overviews for the decisive period of change in the early modern period: André Corvisier, Armées et sociétés en Europe de 1494 à 1789 (Paris, 1976). John Childs, Armies and Warfare in Europe 1648-1789 (Manchester, 1982). Gerhard Papke, Von der Miliz zum stehenden Heer. Wehrwesen im Absolutismus, Handbuch zur deutschen Militärgeschichte 1648-1939, Teil 1.1

(München, 1979).

The basic work is still Fritz Redlich, The German Military Enterpriser and his Work Force. A Study in European Economic and Social History, 2 vols, Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte, supplement 47 and 48, (Wiesbaden, 1964-65). Also important is Reinhard Baumann, Landsknechte. Ihre Geschichte und Kultur vom späten Mittelalter bis zum Dreißig-

jährigen Krieg (München, 1994).

Daniel Höhrath

254

contract, might also, if possible, bring their complete certain extent sold as a service in a complete package. In other words, 'Outsourcing War'15 was the usual practice. The Thirty Years' War (1618-1648) marks the peak and, at the same time, the decisive crisis of this system: The war achieved a momentum which could no longer be controlled and, above all, could scarcely be stopped. The warlords waged war to a certain extent at their own expense, and so, for them, its mere existence became the actual aim of war. The efforts of the rulers to keep troops in their service long-term in order to strengthen their connection to themselves and thereby to control them were a reaction to this crisis. This tendency, however, is much older. Up to the end of the 18th century we can talk about the era of 'regular mercenary armies'. As a consequence of the Treaty of Westphalia (1648), it was possible to establish order in Europe which, although it was still not stable, nonetheless managed to set out the requirements for a cooperation of 'states' with equal rights and, therefore, greater stability. The claim of permanence changed the character of the relationships between the potentates and military power. The military had to be more closely tied to the ruler and his dynasty in other words, to the 'state'. This was accomplished from top to bottom: The open contractual relationship between prince and mercenary contractor developed into the long-term connection of officers as 'servants of the state' to the ruler; gradually complete military affairs were brought under the control of a central state organisation. Gradually 'regular armies' developed in the territories; soldiers were also in service in times of peace. It was only at this point that a military developed from pure affairs of war, no longer existing only during a war. The freelance mercenary developed into the long-serving, strictly-disciplined and uniformed soldier. The supply base of such soldiers could no longer be covered by the freelance mercenary market. Various forms of hierarchical service, which were also laid down in the Treaty of Westphalia as state law served to expand the armies which were henceforth a mixture of volunteers and conscripts, of'locals' and 'foreigners'. The regular armies developed directly from the private industry structure of mercenaryism; older forms of militia systems were formally disbanded or incorporated into the structure of the 'regular mercenary armies' serving as the basis of recruiting of subjects according to need. In some areas, however, there was just a change concerning the system of war economy: Some smaller potentates in particular in the Old Empire acted now as war contractors by themselves making their troops available to alliances in exchange for financial support.16

mercenaries,

as

'tools'. Warfare

parties

was

to

to the

a

-

15 16

The term occurs in David Shearer, "Outsourcing War", Foreign Policy 111 (1998), pp. 68-81. See the important work by Peter H. Wilson, German Armies. War and German politics 1648-1806 (London, 1998). See also Peter H. Wilson, "The German 'Soldier Trade' of the seventeenth and eighteenth Centuries: A Reassessment", The International History Review 18 (1996), no. 4, pp. 757-792.

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255

glance, the regular armies of the 18' century looked like the armed forces of the modern state, but this is at least partly an illusion. This deception resulted from the fact that the armies of the 19th century put themselves in an uninterrupted historical continuity with the first regular regiments. As well as the basic question as to what extent the princely rule of the Ancien Régime fulfilled the requirements of statehood, the fact that an important part of warfare remained outside the actual military organisation for a long time is often overlooked. There were still no dedicated military supply facilities; logistics remained almost solely organised by private economy: The goods and services required for the army, even the cartage business, had to be bought or hired at need decentrally from private contractors.'7 Women and children lived in the garrisons and accompanied the army to war, where their assistance was essential.18 The period of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars resulted in fundamental changes in many areas. Only now the modern state became gradually a reality. In warfare there were fewer revolutionary innovations to be seen than the enormous acceleration of the process of unification and centralisation which had begun earlier. What asserted itself was the 'nationalisation' of armies, which basically were now recruited from their own country without exception, whether on the basis of general conscription of male 'citizens' or in the context of professional armies.19 After the enormous need for soldiers in the era up to 1815, conscription was mostly limited in favour of smaller, more professional armies. We could talk of the type of the regular professional army with a basing on national mobilization. Traditionally, there was particularly in Germany but also in France, a clear distinction made between the mercenary and the professional soldier20, which was naturally far more determined by political and moral criteria than by precise historical analysis.21 Finally this distinction stands in contradiction to the continuity claimed by the armies themselves which is shown in the regimental genealogy, beginning with the first regular units of the 17th century. If we disregard the national paradigm, that soldiers must be bom in the country in whose army they fight and that patriotism has to be the first and only motive for military behaviour, there is not much left of this line of At first

17 18

1

20

21

Jürgen Lüh, Kriegskunst in Europa 1650-1800 (Köln, 2004), pp. 13-80. Daniel Höhrath, "Soldatenfrau, Marketenderin, Lagerdirne", DAMALS 34 (2002), issue 10, pp. 21. For

14-

an overview: Roland G. Foerster, ed. Die Wehrpflicht. Entstehung, Erscheinungsformen und politisch-militärische Wirkung, Beiträge zur Militärgeschichte 43 (München, 1994). See Daniel Moran and Arthur Waldron, eds., The People In Arms. Military Myth and National Mobilization since the French Revolution (Cambridge, 2003). On the term 'Söldner' (mercenary): Michael Sikora, "Söldner historische Annäherung an einen Kriegertypus", Geschichte und Gesellschaft 29 (2003), Heft 2 [Themenheft: Der Krieger], pp. 210238. Michael Sikora, "Der Söldner", in Eva Horn, Stefan Kaufmann and Ulrich Bröckling, eds., Grenzverletzer. Von Schmugglern, Spionen und anderen subversiven Gestalten, copyrights vol. 6, (Berlin, 2002), pp. 114-135. -

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256

demarcation. In the 18' century, practically all soldiers were mercenaries in the legal sense: Whether they came from the country of their employer or were foreigners, whether they served voluntarily or were conscripted. For officers even in the 19th century, a considerable international mobility can be seen. However it must be emphasized that the armies of the 19lh century can be regarded as state institutions with more legitimacy. The whole palette of supplies and logistics was now added to the military organisation, which was much more closely tied into the whole civilian state administration. We are forced to realize quite a paradoxical situation: The classic professional armies were without any doubt state organizations, but at the same time led quite distinctive and in many respects separate lives of their own. This expressed itself in the general billeting of troops and their own jurisdiction which was retained to a large extent. To put it like that: The 19th century military belonged to the state, but was not an integrated part of state and society. This special position was only removed when the armies were extended for the great hot and cold wars of the modem era to armies of millions and the states organized a comprehensive mobilization of both economy and population. This was the starting point of a dialectic development which forms a characteristic of the 20th century: A civilizing of military, as was idealized in democratic systems by the slogan of democratic 'citizens in uniform', and a militarization of society as a whole, as was conspicuous in the totalitarian states. Recently, after the end of the cold war, new transformations have obviously happened, which no longer appear to fit to the 'master narrative' of European military history, which has also left its traces in my short overview. In it a continuous development, logical in itself has been constructed which follows the progress paradigm of the modem era: According to this concept, the 'non-state actors' with their mercenaries were substituted by legitimate states, whose military organizations were made up of citizens as soldiers. This model of development, however, is only a historical fiction; it was based on ignoring the numerous breaches and peculiarities and formed in order to lend consistency to the course of events retrospectively. The new appearance or resurgence of private war organizations which has been observable recently, from warlords and tribal leaders on the periphery of the modem world of states through to internationally active mercenary companies of 'western' calibre22 shows in any case that even military history does not need to show any unchangeably directed development. -

See for instance Peter

(Ithaca, 2004).

Singer, Corporate

-

Warriors. The Rise

of the Privatized Military Industry

Soldiers and Mercenaries, Protagonists in Trans-Cultural Wars in the Modern Era

257

IV. This development of state and military in any case only took place in western and central Europe, where political units which were mostly close neighbours and culturally very similar competed with each other. The mercenary armies of the 16th century, the regular armies of the 18th century and the national armies which succeeded them in the 19th and 20th centuries were always set up in the first instance to fight against each other. Overall, transcultural wars were only a marginal phenomenon for which European armies were not especially prepared. The appearance of modem military affairs must be regarded as part of European political, social and cultural development, but it is problematic to link forms of society, culture and militia too closely to each other. The western military model has proved to be extremely adaptable.23 European militarism has also been successfully imported and adapted to places where the application of western political models failed. In the past two or three centuries an international military culture has come into being which requires special attention. Some wars can be regarded from a social or political viewpoint as clearly being transcultural conflicts; far fewer however as far as the fighting armies are concerned. Military organizations could and can be far more similar to each other than to the societies which surround them. Great more or less 'symmetrical' wars between great military powers with different cultural bases, such as between the western allies and Japan in the Second World War, or between the Central European Empire and the Ottoman Empire in the 17th century are only distinguished from wars between culturally similar opponents in a matter of degree. Even when such wars tended to take on different and frequently brutal forms, this had nothing to do with the composition of the armies. Most transcultural wars in modem history which took place beyond or at the edge of Europe or the 'West' which was influenced by Europe were 'Kleine Kriege' at least from the point of view of the European powers. Frequently other conditions applied to them. This applied even to the leading protagonists: At the same time that in Europe only 'states' and their armies, or at least the early forms of states in the 18th century, waged war, expansion overseas was still determined to a great extent by private or semi-private organizations. Thus organizations such as the 'Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie' of the Republic of the Netherlands or the British 'East India Company' were still major protagonists in waging war abroad. Regarding military aspects, it was quite irrelevant against whom and where war should be waged as far as mercenaries or professional soldiers were involved. Because See David B. Ralston, Importing the European Army. The Introduction of European Military Techniques and Institutions into the Extra-European World, 1660-1914 (Chicago, 1990). Geofffrey Parker, The Military Revolution. Military innovation and the rise of the West, 1500-1800 (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 115-145,201-213.

Daniel Höhrath

258

deployed, at least as far as European soldiers concerned, mostly incomparably lower than in conflicts of powers on the it European continent, was usually possible for the men to be drawn from the pool of volunteers, mercenaries and professional soldiers for the required expeditionary forces. Up to the end of the 18th century and beyond the regiments of regular mercenary armies could basically be deployed in any war within or outside Europe, as is demonstrated by the example of the British army as late as the 19th century. It is tme that there were always certain limits even earlier concerning the deployment of soldiers who were not volunteers but were conscripted as 'subjects'. Fundamentally, the requirement for subjects to serve was based on the principle of national defence a long time before the introduction of conscription and general national service. This concept may still have applied to the wars waged in the Balkans and Mediterranean against the Ottomans, the 'arch-enemy of Christendom'; its use for a deployment overseas, however, would be accepted by the public only seldom. This premodem concept of national defence was transformed to one of the ideological bases of national military politics. Since the French Revolution all warring factions have regarded themselves as being a priori only in situations of defence, although the question of defensive and offensive, just like that of the theatre of war, has apparently become unimportant. 24 Nonetheless the deployability of conscription armies as well as of modem professional armies is highly dependent on the public opinion, at least in in the colonial

were

wars

the numbers of troops

were

democratic systems. For these reasons, from the

19th century on, most states preferred to count on deploying professional troops or even special mercenary forces such as the French Foreign Legion outside Europe. It was also repeatedly possible, in such cases, to form expeditionary corps i. e. special volunteer formations taken out of the existing forces, as for instance was the case with the 'Kaiserliche Schutztruppe' in the German colonies. Another option was (and is) forming special forces for transcultural war in a particular region, where troops from the population of the disputed or neighbouring regions are taken, who are ethnically or culturally close to the enemy or even originate from groups who are on good terms with the enemy's population. This to a certain extent removes the cultural bounderies between the parties because the war is mainly waged by participants from the same culture, and so at least in this respect is no longer a transcultural war. Typical examples of this are light cavalry (the Hussars) who were first deployed in the Turkish wars in Hungary and the Balkans on the Austrian side; above all however there are the large armies of the colonial powers which were made 25 up of local people, first in south Asia and later also in Africa. Thus the statement, which has been much-quoted since 2002, by German defence minister Peter Struck referring to the troops sent to Afghanistan, that the Bundeswehr defends Germany's freedom even in Hindu Kush, found little positive resonance in the population. See David Killigray and David Omissi, eds. Guardians of Empire. The Armed Forces of the Colonial Powers c. 1700-1964 (Manchester, 1999).

Soldiers and Mercenaries,

Protagonists in Trans-Cultural Wars in the Modern Era

259

Whereas in the case of the south east European cavalry both the weapons and the fighting styles of the Turkish opponents were used, this was no longer usual in the case of the colonial armies overseas because 'western' weapons, discipline and tactics mostly came to light as being superior, especially since the industrial revolution of weapons technology in the second half of the 19th century. It is interesting to observe that in the colonial armes a kind of mixed military culture made of European and regional elements emerged, as for instance in the case of the Sepoys in British India.26 Another variant is the deployment of soldiers from foreign cultures in transcultural wars against enemies with whose cultur they have nothing in common but appear to be particularly suitable because of their behaviour and their fighting methods. This applied for instance to the Bosniak lancers, whom Frederick the Great deployed especially against the Russian Cossacks who likewise fought with lances. There are some quite curious examples of this type of deployment, such as the particular suitability of Scottish highlanders for 'wilderness warfare' in the Seven Years' War in North

America.27 Finally, the use of such troops far beyond their region of origin in wars between Europeans or western military powers changed at least a part of that theatre of war into for instance in the deployment of the Gurkha Rifles by a zone of transcultural warfare

the British army in recent times. For European or 'western' armies, transcultural war was never an everyday job. The formation of professional armies and modem military affairs, which ultimately in its form became a model worldwide, was a significant element of European development and the formation of states in the early modem era. European armies were always oriented towards fighting those similar to them, because most of the 'great' wars occurred between neighbouring, and therefore mainly culturally close, states. If we disregard the cases where in the context of a conflict the foreignness of the opponent was constructed on short terms, transcultural wars in Europe were mainly fought on the periphery in the expansion and defensive conflicts of the Middle Ages and the early modem era, particularly against the Ottoman Empire. The far more common form of transcultural war was the 'Kleine Krieg' which was waged far beyond Europe and took place in the context of colonial expansion overseas. Usually only a small part of the 'western' armies were involved, while the major part of the fighting was bome by troops who were gathered from the population of the affected -

area.

Ultimately military affairs

in the modem era formed their own 'military culture'. It be stressed that the internal and external organization and appearance of European militarism have fundamentally prevailed worldwide. Obviously it was possible for the military structures and the 'military culture' which emerged in Europe to be applied to must

See John A. Lynn, Battle (see above, n. 2), pp. 145-177. James Michael Hill, Celtic Warfare (cf. above, n. 6), pp. 157-172.

260

Daniel Höhrath

societies with quite different cultural backgrounds and quite different histories. It would be particularly worthwhile to examine for instance the mixed forms where European elements which had been applied were combined with elements taken from the local tradition. Very often the military protagonists fighting in a war were culturally closer to each other than the civilian societies who were behind them. It is possible that transcultural war should be sought where the military cultures of the conflicting parties are no longer compatible or even no longer exist.

Indices

Index locorum Abyssinia 97 Acre 134,136, 137, 191 Adana 76 Adriatic 241 Afghanistan 26, 103 Africa 93-96, 251, 258 Central Africa 96 East Africa see under Namibia North Africa 94, 97 South Africa 93 South West Africa 95 Sub-Saharan Africa 96 Agincourt 51, 52 Albania 229, 231 Albany 57 Albara 131 Aleppo 189 Algeria 94, 101 America 89,91,98-100, 259 Anatolia 76, 229, 232 Anglesey 50 Aragon 240 Asia 34, 171, 177, 258 Assaye 92 Austria 172, 220 Austria-Hungary 86 Avaricum 111 'Ayn Jalut 224 Azopart 134

Babylon 35 Badajoz 87 Baghdad 102

Balkans 37, 215, 228, 229, 245, 247, 258

Ballon 129 Baltic (region) 43, 55, 56, 118, 120, 139, 172, 178, 240 Bangor 119 Bannockburn 48, 50, 64 Bangladesh 166 Baskent 234, 244 Bâtaszék214 Belfast 101 Belgium 93, 95 Belgrade 91, 233, 236, 240 Bergnes 154 Berlin 168, 171 Berwick 48 Bicocca 69 Birr 115 Bohemia 65 Bolingbroke 54 Boroughbridge 51 Bosnia 76, 169 Bosphorus 234 Boulogne 54 Bouvines 38 Brémule31,32, 38, 129 Britain 43, 86, 93, 95, 98, 100,109, 118, 123, 138 British Commonwealth 99 British Isles 48, 55 Buda 232 Budapest 172 Burgundy 21,245, 246 Bursuqi 107 Busra 134 Byzantium 102, 217

262

Indices

Caen 53, 130, 154 Caernarfon 55 Cairo 134, 136, 225,245 Caister Castle 163 Canterbury 46 Carlisle 48 Carolina 176 South Carolina 206 Carpatians215, 222, 228 Castile 153 Caucasus 227 Cesena 53 Chaumont 129 Chester 119 China 36, 37, 99, 174, 177, 221 Clermont 129 Cleves 75 Colloden Moor 79

Europe passim Ezaz 107

Fehrbellin 75, 76 Flodden 122 Fontenoy 85 Fort William Henry 57 France (Frankreich) 21,

22, 23, 26, 44, 47, 53, 54, 70, 71, 87, 89f., 94f, 97, 122, 138, 177, 240, 255

Franconia 75 Frankia 119

Galloway 123 Gascony 47

Cologne 161 Congo 95, 182

Gaza 133 Geldern 70 Geneva 100 Georgia 176 German South West Africa see under Namibia

Constance, Lake 69

Germany 51, 53, 88, 95, 98, 172, 178,

Constantinople 55, 234

255 Golubac 233 Grandson 67, 69 Greece 86, 102 Gwynned, land of 125, 126

Courtrai 38,41, 53,64

Crécy 51 Crema 47 Crimea 94 Croatia 169 Culloden 89 Cumbria 127

Dalriada, Scottish 115,

Gyulafehérvâr 232, 244

120

Damascus 131, 189 Damne 154 Danube 77, 240, 246 Darum 133 Doué-la-Fontaine 54 Drogheda, 71 Dublin 124 Diirnkrut 220 Dumnonia 121 Dupplin Moor 51

Edessa 132, 193

Egypt 93, 143-145, 187,189, 247 England 21, 23, 26, 44, 47, 50, 53, 116, 119, 122, 123, 125, 162,213,224, 247 English channel 222 Ethiopia 145, 167

Halidon Hill 51 Hama 136 Hard 69 Hattin 132, 136, 137 Hellesdon, Manor of 163 Hereford 125 Horns 225 Hudson 57

Hungary 154, 172, 213, 217, 218, 224, 227, 228, 229, 236, 241, 245, 246, 258 Ile de France 46 India 32, 93, 251,259 Indiana 206 Indonesia 177

Iraq 11, 13, 18, 97, 226, 227 36, 40, 48, 54, 55, 56, 71, 101, 109,

Ireland

115, 118, 120, 122, 123,

139

Isandhwalna 93

Italy 21, 47, 53, 54, 86, 90, 97, 167, 246

Indices Izmail 88 Jaffa 131, 135, 188 Japan 32, 34, 99, 257 Jericho 113 Jerusalem 16, 17, 21, 35, 39, 111, 130, 132, 133, 189, 190, 192, 193 new Jerusalem 206 Jerusalem, Latin Kingdom of 222

Kenyérmezô 232 Kenya 101 Khartoum 144f.

Kipchak steppe 224 Korea 177 Kosovo 169,216 Kosovo (1389) 231 Kosovo Polje(1448) 233 Krak des Chevaliers 132 Kulikovo Field 227 Langeais 54 Latvia 172

Le-Coudray Salbart 54 Le Mans see under Mans Le Puy see under Puy Lech 220 Legnano 53

263 Maine 129 Malaya 101 Manceaux 129 Manila 171

Mans, Le 53, 129 March 74

Marquesas Islands 94 Mecca 193

Medvegalis 223

Mercia 119

Mesopotamia 190 mid-West 204 Mohâcs 213, 231, 236, 237, 239, 244 Moldavia 228 Mont Saint Michel 157, 159 Morat 66, 67 Morgarten 64

Morocco 96 Moscow 173 Muhi 213, 219, 220, 221, 227, My Lai 58, 101, 178 MynyddCarn 120

228, 229, 243

Nablus 131, 193 Namibia (German South West Africa) 95, 96, 67, 176

Libya 97

Nanjing/Nanking 171, 173, 174 Narbonne 52 Narbonne, council of (1054) 115 Netherlands 257 Neuchâtel, Lake 67 New England 204 New York 57 New Zealand 92, 97

Limoges 53

Nicopolis 216, 222, 228-237, 239, 242-245 Normandy 53, 129, 130

Legnica 219, 221,244

Leicester 46 Leitha 220 Lepanto 103 Levant 108, 128, 134, 137, 139

Limerick 54

Lincolnshire 54 Lisbon 45 Lithuania 222 Little Britain 161 Livonia 240 Lleyn 125 Lombardy 21, 22 London 72 Tower of London 48 Londonderry 101 Low Contries 44, 47, 51, 53 Ma'arat a-Numan 130

Northumbria 118, 119, 120, 127 Ohio 206 Omaheke desert 176 Omdurman 144f. Osraige 125 Ottoman Empire 86, 88, 257 Outremer 108, 128, 135, 138

Palestine 16, 17, 21, 131, 189, 224 Pannonia 121 Paris 88, 91, 94f. Pavia 69

264

Indices

Pelekanon 230

Sussex Weald 49 Sweden 74 Swedish Pomerania 74 Switzerland 90

Pennsylvania 206

Persia 36, 226, 227 Petrovaradin 76

Philippines 177 Poitiers 51 Poland 172, 178,218 Portugal 93 Powys 125 Prignitz 74 Prussia 88, 186,215, 240 Punjab 92 Puy, Le 115

Syria 21, 131, 189, 224, 226 Szâvaszentdemeter 236 Taiwan 177 Tarifa 221 Texas 142

Tokyo 171,

Ramla 133

Ravensbriick 178 Rhin 75 Rhineland 179 Rif97 Rome 102, 111, 112, 161,206 Rouen 130 Rovine 231 Roxburgh 48 Rumelia 229, 232, 241 Russia 33, 34, 84, 90, 98, 178, 221,224 Rwanda, 26, 58, 182 Sainte

Suzanne, garrison Saj6 219, 221

129

Salado 221 Salamis 102 Savoy 55

Scandinavia 118, 120 Scotland 49, 50, 53, 89f., Sedan 95 Senta 76 Sevastopol 91 Sicily 21, 39 Sidon 131

122,125, 126

Stockholm 74 Styria 220 Sudan 141, 144

Transylvania 224, 240, 241 Tripoli 131, 192 Troy 161 Turnu Severin 233, 240

Tyre 193 Tyrol 45 Uckermark 74, 76 Ukraine 172, 178 Umm Hagar 144 United Provinces 74 United States/US 95, 201,202, 203

99-103, 169, 172, 180,

Varna 214, 231,233,244 Vendée 94 Venice 33 Verden 117 Versailles 96 Vienna 33, 76, 90, 172 Vietnam 25, 100-102, 166, 177, 178 Wadi al-Khazindar 225 Wales 36, 48, 50, 55, 122,123, 139 Wark, Castle 56 Warsaw 91

Slankamen 76 Snowdonia 126 Soviet Union 37, 100

Spain 14, 16,21,22, 90,94, St. Évroult 129 Stalingrad 98 Stirling (Bridge) 48, 50, 53

174

Tournai 51

Waterberg 176

Waterford 124, 125 Wessex 118 108

Westphalia 87 Ystrad Antarron 39 YstradTwyi 125 Yorkshire 123 Yugoslavia 166, 169

125,126,

Indices Zorndorf 78 Zululand 93

Index personarum Abizaid, John 13, 18 Absalom, king 152 Abu Hanifa, Muslim jurist 113-114,134 Abu 1-Mahasin, Egyptian chronicler 137 Adams, John 205 Adomnan, abbot of Iona 115, 117, 120 Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini (Pius II) 50 Aethelfried, Northumbrian king 119

Aethelstan of Wessex 121 Ailred ofRievaulx 124 Al-Adil, Saladins brother 136 Alberic of Ostia, papal legate 126 Albert of Aachen 130 Aldhelm 121 Alexander I, Russian Tsar 88 Alfonso XI, King of Castile 221

Al-Kamil, Sultan 191 Amherst, Sir Jeffrey 89

Ammianus Marcellinus 34 Amnon, brother of Tamar 152 Anastasius, papal librarian 191 Andrew II, King of Hungary 240 Anna Comnena 35 Aquinas see under Thomas of A. Archibald, earl of Argyll 121 Augustine, church father 110, 112, 121,152

Baldwin I, King of Jerusalem 107, 131, 134 Baldwin oflbelin 133, 135 Bathsheba, wife of Uriah the Hittite 152 Baybars, Sultan 132

Bayezid I, Sultan 229, 230, 231, 232, 239, 243

Beha-ad-Din, Saladin's biographer 135 Bede 119, 120, 121 Béla IV, King of Hungary 220, 221, 227

Benzo of Alba 186 Bernhard of Clairvaux 21, 190 Black Prince see Edward, Prince of Wales Bokenham, Osbem 161 Bonet (Bouvet), Honoré 52, 109, 110, 111,

265

114,138 Booth, Ken 100 Boris, Khan 117 Boni, Brian 118 Boucicaut, French Marshal 243 Bouvet, Honoré see under Bonet, H. Brantôme, Pierre de 70

Brauchitsch, Walther von 175 Brodarics, Stephen, Bishop 236

Bruce, Alexander 48 Bruce, Mary 48 Bruce, Robert 48, 127 Bruce, Thomas 48

Biilow, Heinrich von 87

Bugeaud, Thomas-Robert 94 Bursuqi, Muslim commander 107 Bush, George W. 11, 18,42,103 Cade, Jack 164 Cadwalla (ofRheged) 120, 121 Caesar 111 Callot, Jacques 76 Callwell, C. E. 91-93 Cavaignac, Eugène 94 Cecil, Lord Robert 96

Cetshwayo, Zulu chief 93 Charlemagne 117, 119

Charles the Bold 66, 67, Chaucer, Geffroy 152, 162

Thomas 163 Chrétien de Troyes 159 Cicero 111, 112 Clausewitz, Carl von 11,14, 87,100 Clement III, Antipope 191 Clifton, G. R. 97 Cressida 152 Cromwell, Oliver 71

David, King 152

David I,

King of Scotland 117, Derfflinger, Georg 76 Dinah, daughter of Jacob 152

126

Douhet, Giulio 97

Duke of Alba 71 Duke of Cumberland 89 Duke of Suffolk 163 Ebba of Collingham, abbess 155, 156 Edward I, King of England 44, 48-51, 55

266

Indices

Edward II, King of England 50, 127 Edward III, King of England 47, 49, 51, 52, 214 Edward, Prince of Wales (the Black Prince) 52, 53 Einhard 120 Eisenhower, Dwight D. 18 Elmas Mohammed Pascha, Grand Vizier 77 Espec, Walter 124 Eugene, Prince of Savoy 77

Fantosme, Jordan, poet 138 Fastolf, Sir John 138, 163, 164 Fitz Stephen 125 Frederick I (Barbarossa) 22, 24, 45, 47, 53 Frederick II (Hohenstaufen) 39 Frederick the Great, King of Prussia 259 Frederick William, Duke of Brandenburg (1620-1688) 75 Friedrich Ulrich, Duke of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel 73 Froissart, Jean 153, 154, 243 Fulcher of Chartres 131, 134, 188, 189

Gambetta, Léon 95 Ghazan Khan 226 Genghis Khan 88 Geoffrey of Monmouth 157 George, Lloyd 96 Gerald of Wales 124-126, 139 Ghillebert de Lannoy 187 Gloys, James 163 Godfray of Harecourt, Sir 154 Gordon (British General in Sudan) 144 Gough, Sir Hugh 92 Great Khan 33 Gregory IX 192 Grotius, Hugo 86 Gruffyd ap Cynan 120, 125 Gruffyd ap Rhys 125 Guderian, Heinz 98 Guibert of Nogent 191 Guy, King of Jerusalem 132 Gwrgan ap Seisyll 125

Hagar, Abraham's servant 186 Halleck (Union General in US Civil War) Handel, Michael 99 Hanson, Victor Davis 102f.

Harclay, Andrew 51 Harold Godwineson 126 Hart, Basil Liddell 86, 102 Hasseena 145 Hawkwood, Sir John 53 Helen of Troy 152, 161 Helmold, chronicler 44 Henry I, King of England 31, 125 Henry II, King of England 53, 54, 138 Henry V, Emperor, 186 Henry V, King of England 109, 214 Henry the Fowler (I), King of Germany 117 Henry, Duke of Wroclaw 244 Henry of Livonia 119, 120 Hervey de Montmorency 124 Hieronymus 186 Hitler, Adolf 23, 88, 97f, 100 Holland, Thomas 53 Holofernes 161 Honoré Bonet (Bouvet) see under Bonet H. Hooghe, Romeyn de 76 Home, John 95 Hugh of Chester 125 Huntington, Samuel 99 Hunyadi, Jânos 214, 232-235, 238, 244 Ibnal-Athir 132, 133 Imad al-Din 133 Isolani, Colonel of the Wallenstein army 73

Jackson, Andrew 203, 206 James de Voragaine 139-140 Jefferson, Thomas 203, 205, 206 Jean de Mandevill 187 Jiskra, Bohemian warlord 235 Joab, King 152 Joan of Arc 154 John, King of Bohemia 223 John, King of England 54 John of Piano Carpini 226, 245 John of Salisbury 126 John of Worcester 121 Johnson, Andrew 207

143

Jomini, Antoine-Henri 85, 87, 90, 100 Joshua 113 Judith, the Israelite 161, 162 Justinian, Roman emperor 112 Kaman Pashazade 239

Indices

Kerbogha, atabeg of Mosul

267 134

Khalif 144-146 Kitchener, Herbert 145 f. Kramer, Alan 95

Lackfi, Andrâs 228 Ladislaus IV, King of Hungary 227, 228 Lake, Gerard 92 Lavinia 152 Lazamon 157 Lebuin, saint 117 Liber, Francis 180 Lincoln, Abraham 142, 202, 206 Livy 152 Llywelyn ap Gruffudd 48 Loudon, Lord 89, 96 Louis VI, King of France 31 Louis XIV, King of France 74 Louis 'the Great', King of Hungary 216, 217 Louis II, King of Hungary 237 Lucretia 152 Lyautey, Hubert 96 Mac Murchada, Diarmait 125 Mahdi 141, 144 Ma'mun al-Bata'ihi, Fatimid Vizier 136 Mannheim, Karl 200 Manstein, Erich von 98 Marmion, Sir William 56 Marshal, William 53 Marx, Karl 200 Matthew Paris 124, 155 Matthias Corvinus 217, 234-236, 241, 246 Mehmed II, Sultan 234, 241, 246 Möngke, Great Khan 222 Moleyns, Lord 163 Monroe, George, Colonel 57 Montcalm-Gozon de Saint Veran, Louis Joseph, marquis de 57 Moore, Sir John 87 Muhammed, Prophet 114, 187, 189, 191 Murat I, Sultan 231 Murât II, Sultan 231

Napier, William 87 Napoleon Bonaparte 14, 17, 32, 85, 87, 90 see also under Napoleonic wars (Index rerum) Naveth, son of Odo 124

Neufeld, Charles 143-146 Nicholas I, Pope 117 Nur ad-Din 114, 128, 189, 190

Ögedei, Great Khan 221, 222, 227 Özbeg Khan 228

Ohrwalder (German minister) 145 Oliver of Paderborn 191 Orderic Vitalis 31, 126,129 Orhan, Emir 230 Origen, church father 112 Osraige 125 Otto I (Ottoman), King of Germany 220 Otto of Freising 45, 190 Ovid 152 Owain Glyn Dwr 125 Pâl Kinizsi, Hungarian military leader 232 Pâl Tomori, archbishop 238 Paris 152 Pasten, John 162-164 Margaret 162-164 Payn, J. 164 Penda of Mercia 120 Petrus Venerabilis 191 Philip II Augustus, King of France 108, 138 Philip of Flanders 138 Philip IV, King of France 44 Pirckheimer, Willibald 67 Pius II see under Aeneas Pontiac (Ottawa chief) 89f. Prittwitz, Christian Wilhelm von 78

Qalawun, Sultan 225 Rahewin 45 Razo the Steward 39 Renoir, Jean 98f. Reynaud of Chatillon 136 Richard I, (the Lionheart) King of England

108, 132, 136, 137,214

Richard II, King of England 109 Richard Marshal 46 Richter, Hanns zu Kannburg 70 Ricoldo de Monte Croce 190 Robert Guiscard 186 Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada 190 Roger Bacon 186 Roger of Wendover 46, 154, 155

268

Indices

Rommel, Erwin 97f. Saddam Hussein 13

Saint-Arnaud, Leroy de 94

Saladin36, 128, 132, 133, 135-137, 190 Sarah, Abraham's wife 186 Schmitt, Carl 81 Scolari, Filippo 241

Shakespeare, William 152 Shaybani, Muslim jurist 113

Shechem 152 Sherman, William 176 Sigismund, King of Hungary 229, 230, 232, 233, 235,236, 243, 244 Simon de Montfort 38, 46 Smuts, Jan Christian 96 Stephen, King of England 52, 116 Stephenson (British General in Egypt) 144 Suger of St. Denis 186 Suleyman 'the Magnificent' 231, 236, 247

Summers, Harry 100 SunTzu 100, 102

Sweyn, Danish King 155 Szapolyai, Gyorgy, Hungarian commander 238

Wace 157

Wallace, William 53, 127

Wallenstein, 73 Walsingham, Thomas 125 Washington, George 205

Weber, Max 19, 200

Weigley, Russell 86 Weizsäcker, Richard von 23 Wellesley, Arthur (Duke of Wellington) 92 Widukind of Corvey 220 William I (the Conqueror), King of England

123 William II (Rufus), King of England 129 William of Tripoli 191, 192 William of Tyre 107, 108, 109,128, 139,

189,190

Wimpheling, Jakob 65 Wladislas I, King of Hungary 233, 244

Wrangel, Carl Gustav 76 Wulfstan, Archbishop 154, 155

Zangi, atabeg of Mosul

132

Index rerum

Talovac, brothers 241 Tamar 152

Tamora, Queen of the Goths 152 Tertullian, church father 112

Theophanes, chronicler 191 Thomas of Aquinas 110, 116 Titus Andronicus 152

Titus, Roman emperor 111 Trahairn, lord of Arwystli 120

Trajan, Roman emperor 111 Troilus 152 Tughtakin, ruler of Damascus 136 Umm es Shole 145 Urban II, Pope 129,187, 192 Usamah Ibn-Munquid, Syrian emir 135, 136 Uzun Hasan, ruler of the Akkoyunlu empire 234, 244

Vallendigham, Clement 209 Vattel, Emmerich de 86

Vegetius 236

abuse of children 170 acculturation 36 Agareni 186 'ahl ad-dimmah 113 'ahlal-kitab 113 akinjis 230 alliance 88 Amazons 151 Amorites 112

archer(y) 49, 50-52, 224, 226

horse a. 214, 229, 230 mounted a. 219, 220, 223, 224, 232, 247

armament

91

army/armies, passim conscription a. 258 permanent/standing a. 239, 240, 245 artillery 57, 67, 69, 77, 9If, 234, 237 assimilation 50, 96 atrocity /atrocities 93, 95, 97-99, 124 banderia 235, 244

269

Indices barbarian 120, 121, 123, 124, 139, 140 barbarisation 97 barbarism 88 barbarity 87, 111, 137, 138 battalion 93

battle(s), passim

also under individual names (index locorum) e. g. Bouvines; Brémule; Crécy; Fontenoy etc.

see

battlefield 91-93, 95, 98, 236 battleships 100 bellum b. hostile 112 b. Romanum 112

bestiality 99 Blitzkrieg 25, 219

civilian(s) 87-91, 94f, 97-99, 174,

blockade 86 blood-thirstiness 97 Bolshevism 98 bombardment 97 bombing fleets 97

176

civilian status 96 civilization 88f, 91, 103, 146 civilised world 97 clans 90 clerks 144 colony/colonies 89, 96, 101 colonial experience 95 colonial troops 96 colonisers 89 combat

strategic bombing 97

booty 72, 118, 134 Brabançons 44 bravery 93 brigade 97 brigandage 110

brutalisation 124

brutality 76, 90, 119,

see also under archer ceremonial 85 chevauchée 51, 52, 110,213 see also under raid chivalric/chivalrous c. behaviour 44, 151 c. concepts 56, 129 c. conduct 115 c. ethos 123 c. heroism 56 c. restraint 129 c. warfare 124 chivalry 38, 43, 53, 157, 158, 160 christian(s) 146 Christianity 87 citizen(s) 102, 143

close-quarters c. 220, 224, 226

130

bulwark 98 bushi, the Kamakura 34

camp(s) 89, 99

camp(s) 98, 176, campaign(s)/Campaigning 92, 94, 97 concentration

178

Canaanites 112 capitalism 86, 102

captives/captivity 129, 130,144, 146, 137, 138, 157

captors 146 casualties 87, 92, 97 Catalan company 240

Catholic(s) 87, 89 cavalry 38,49, 50, 65, 69, 75, 77, 88,220,

221,225, 229-235, 237, 241, 243,258, 259

heavily armoured horsemen 233 household c. 231 light horsemen 92

face-to-face c. 35 hand-to-hand c. 60 single c. 45 combatant 32, 58, 65, 67, 79, 93, 95, 101, 109, 114, 174, 250 commandées) 89f, 92f., 97, 109, 143f. commander-in-chief 11, 94 communication 142 compaignies d'ordonnance 235

companies

free c. 44 mercenary c. 53 concentration camp see under camp(s) condottiere 45 confederacy 142f, 146 conquest 91-93 colonial conqueror 92, 96 conscription 90, 98 contamination 97 control 88 conventions 43, 90

Indices

270 also under rules (of war) and customs (of war) chivalric conventions 47, 48, 52 Geneva convention 100 international war conventions 78 corruption 88 cossacks 88 criminals 141, 143f. crisis 99 crossbow 53, 54 crossbowmen 50, 229 cruelty 87,120,138, 140, 146 crusade 16-19, 25, 26, 35, 43, 56, 141, see

188-192,215 crusader 192, 193, 228 c. host 242, 243 c. states 193

cultures, passim customs (of war) 91, 109, 115, 130, 138, 139 see

also under conventions

Dar al-Harb 113 Dar al-Islam 113 D-Day 98 decolonisation 22 Decretum (Gratian's) 115 defeat 90, 93, 101 defence 94, 96, 103 democracy 103 dervishes 145f. desert 144f. devil(s) 146 devshlrme 231

discipline 85, 87, 91, 94, 118, 174, 221, 243

disciplinary practices 93 disciplinary regime 245

division 97 drill 85 droit de guerre 113

earthworks 92 East India Company 92, 93 (n. 23) education 85 emasculation 90 emirs 144 Enlightenment 57, 82, 87f. enlightened rationalism 80 enlightened theory of war 82

enslavement 118, 133, 181,223 escape 97, 142, 145f. esprit de corps 91

ethnicity 37, 86, 99 ethnic cleansing 89 excess(es) 78, 95 execution(s) 48, 94, 118, 137 expansion colonial 56

expedition 144 punitive expedition 67, 71, 93 extermination 39, 76 extinction 79

extirpation 112,

124

fanaticism 99 fanners 102f. fascism 98 ferocity 89, 91 feud 64-66, 68, 70, 79 firearms 234 firepower 92 fleet 103

fortification(s) 93,

145

founders 234 freedom 102 French Foreign Legion 258 French Revolution (1789) see under revolution front(s) 96-98, 143 frontier 88, 93,240,241 f. fortress 236, 240 military f. 240

garrison/garrisoning 48, 52, 53, 67, 93, 131, 133, 136, 137, 240, 255 gas 97 Geneva Conventions see under rules genocide 89, 95, 172, 176, 182 Gewalthaufen 69 government 142, 144 Greek fire 102

guard(s) 85, 142, 144f. guerilla(s) 90, 92, 94,125, 139, 250 guerre couverte 65 guerre de feu et de sang 65 guerre des seigneurs 65 guerre mortelle 65 guides 144

271

Indices gun

gunpowder technology 234 gunpowder weapons 232 handgun(ners) 69, 233, 234

halqa troops 225 head-hunter 47

headhunting 45, 48 helmet(s) 31, 86 Hereros 95 heretics 192 Highlanders 89, 94 Highlandism 90 Hittites 112 holy war see under war honour 87, 97, 99 hordes 98 Mongol hordes 88 horsemen 232, 237-239 humanity 89 hussars 232 identity 47, 99 ideology/ideologies 98, 101 immunity 95, 101 Imperial War Cabinet 96 industry 97 infantry 38, 39, 65, 68, 75, 102, 240

elite i. 231 mercenary i. 235 Swiss i. 65 infantrymen 65 insurgency 101 insurgents 101 invaders 90 invasion 94 Islam 87, 190, 191 Islamic society 102 lus lus ad bellum 66, 70, 81, 83, 99, 112 lus in hello 70, 81, 83, 99, 112-117 lus publicum europaeum 82, 84

Jacobites 89f.

Janissaries/Janissary corps 88, 231, 234, 235, 237-239, 241,245

jihad 113, 128, jizya 113

133

Kaiserliche Schutztruppe 258 kapukulu 231, 239 kesig 226 King's African Rifles 93

kleinkrieg 241 knight(s)31,32,43,215, 222 dismounted k. 51 mailed k. 214 mounted k. 54 Koran 190, 191 lances 43, 88

Landfahne, bäuerliche 75

Landsknechte 69

Landsknechtsfähnlein 69 lansquenet 69, 70 law(s) (of war) 47, 48, 86, 91, 96, 101, 142f., 145, 173, 181 also under mies (of war) legitimacy 85 levies colonial 1. 93 lex l. belli 113 /. deditionis 113, 128 /. innocentium 115, 117, 120 /. pactorum 128 Lieber Code 142 Litauenreisen 223 longbow 49, 52 loot 94 looting 94 see

macecler 63 machine gun 91 maltreatment 142 mamluk 224, 225, 226, 235, 245, 247 see also under slave, slavery manoeuvre 92, 102 Maori 92, 97 marauders 232 Marine Corps, US 100 masculinity 167, 168 mass killing 137, 171, 174 mass rape 170, 172, 174

massacre(s) 57, 58, 61, 63, 64, 66, 67, 69-72, 76, 77, 79, 80, 82, 83, 97, 99, 101, 117, 118, 124, 136, 178, 193 massacre

de Saint Barthélémy 70

272

Indices

massue

63

matteuculare 63 mercenary 22, 44,

52-54, 70, 72, 131, 224, 235, 237, 246, 254, 255, 256 m. army/forces 44, 234, 235, 240, 253, 254, 256, 257

contractors 253 market 68 militarisation 96 militarism 86,102 military academy 100 military doctrine 103 militia 250 militia portalis 216, 232, 235 mistreatment 146 mobilisation 98, 100 Mongols 43 Monophysites 192 m. m.

Moslem(s) 43, 146, 185, 186,190

murder 133, 155, 173, 178, 180 Muslim(s) see under Moslem(s) mutilate/mutilation 114, 124, 125, 170, 173, 178

napalm 102 nation(s) 86, 89, 97,101

non-combatant(s) 32, 33, 35, 39, 86, 90, 95, 97, 101, 108, 109, 123, 125, 126, 130, 133-135, 137-139, 168, 250 norm(s) 85, 94, 96, 98, 101

officer(s) 85, 89, 91, 142, 254, 256 pacifism 112, 116 palfrey 46 palisades 92 partisans 14, 250

a. a.

prisoners) (of war) 32, 35, 39, 44, 48, 65,

72, 79, 86f, 90, 96-99, 111, 112, 116, 118, 119, 123,124, 126, 131, 133, 135, 136, 139, 141-146, 171, 176 propaganda 46, 57, 76, 80, 82, 83, 96, 98, 179, 199-201,203,206, 208 209, 251

prostitute 166 prostitution 170, 177, 178, Protestant(s) 87, 89, 145 race

nationalism 29, 36 native(s) 96, 144f. native land 89 native population 96 navy/navies 86, 100, 103, 143 naval battle 103 naval hierarchies 103 Nazis 98, 100 Nestorians 192

pax Romana 112 Peace and Truce of God

T. of G. legislation 116, 123,130 T. of G. movement 115 peasants 32, 33, 52, 67, 99 penalty 144 pillage 45, 52, 155 plunder 51, 56, 72, 78, 125, 127 plundering 94 police 96 powder 145 power colonial power(s) 95, 101 land power 86 sea power 86, 102 prison 144f. P. P.

matteuca 63

87, 99

racial considerations 143 racism 99, 175, 177, 178, 182 raiders 119 raiding 127 raids 55, 154 cattle-r. 49 counter-r. 55 (cross-)border r. 50, 241 mounted r. 49 plundering r. 51 railways 91

38,44,48, 52, 56, 65, 123, 127-130, 133,135-139 rape/raping 94, 134, 151, 152, 154, 155, 156, 166, 168, 171, 174, 175, 178-181 rebellion/re6e//w 20, 22, 53, 89f, 141 rebels 90, 141,206, 209 ransom

recruitment 96

117, 138

181

regiment(s) 87, 89, 93 Reisläufer 68, 69 religion 87f, 99 reprisals 146 retaliation 143

Indices

273

revolt 20, 22, 95

revolution(s) 20, 22, 85, 90f, 94f.

counter-revolution 94 French Revolution 255 revolutionary wars 87 rifle(s)91, 101 rituals 59, 60, 76 rules (of war) 58, 59, 89,101, 117, 142 see also under conventions and customs

the „Hague Rules of Land Warfare" (1899/1907) 180, 181 the „Geneva Conventions" (1949) and the additional protocols (1977) 181 sack 87, 130,131 sailors 142 Saraceni 186 savagery 97 wars against savages 96 Schädigung 66 Second Empire 95 self-image 60 Sepoys 259 September 11 (2001)42, 103 servant(s) 144f.

shield 43,46 Shiite 190

123, 126, 130, 132,223 slavery 86, 134, 135, 202, 203, 207, 210, 226, 245, 247 also under mamluk

slaves 94

stereotype(s) 46, 56, 66, 72, 73, 74, 77, 79,

82, 85, 162, 175, 177, 192, 195, 196, 198-202, 204, 208,210 strategy/strategies 86, 89, 91, 100, 103 strategic culture 100, 103

Streitaustrag 66

Sunnite 190 Suriani 186 sword 43, 87 broadsword 89 symmetry 100 Syri 186

tactics 92, 228 tactical competence 99 tactical deployment 232 tactical flexibility 221

technology/technologies 85, 92,

101 f.

94,103 terrorism 101, 103 Third Republic 95 timar system 231

101, 120, 146, 170, 178 tradition(s) 85, 89,91,93, 100 Treaty of Westphalia 254 torture

training 96 tribe 144 tribal communities 89 turcopoles 223 Union 142-144

slave soldiers 249 see also under mamluk socialism 98

society/societies

soldiers, passim foot s. 69, 237

spear 46 spies 143 spurs 38 staff 85f. steamboats 91

uniform(s) 85

military s. 231

civil/civilised warrior s. 93

salaried s. 231

Spanish Armada 72 Spanish Conquista 251

terror 90,

siege(s) 47, 87, 91, 95,112, 213 besieged cities 87 siege engine 48 sipahis 231, 232 siyar 113 slaughter 32, 35, 38, 39, 53, 58, 63, 72, 117,

see

professional s. 224, 239, 255, 257

s.

90, 93

Valkyries 151 victims 87 violence/violation 157 sexual v. 151, 161, 165, 166, 172, 175, 177,181, 182 vivandière 166

274

Indices

Wagenburgen (wagon forts) 215, 233, 234

wall(s) 87, 92 war(s)

American Civil W. (1861-1865) 175, 201, 205 Anglo-French w. 241 Anglo-Scottish w. 241 civil w. 12, 15, 20, 21, 25, 26, 33, 52,

71,90, 141f, 144, 146, 172, 251

civilised w. 91, 96 Cold w. 15, 98-101, 103, 197, 198, 256 colonial wVconflicts 82, 91-93, 101, 167, 176, 250, 258 counter-insurgency w. 94 cruiser w. 103 German Peasants' W. 71 Guerilla w. 12, 13, 14, 15, 18, 19, 22, 23, 92, 176

holy w. 11, 15,

124 Hundred Years W. 19, 23, 26, 44 Hussite W. 214 inter-faith w. 139 Israeli-Arab-Six-Day-W. (1967) 24 Italian W. (12th century) 24 Italian W. against Ethiopia (1935/36) 167 Japanes-American war 251 Maratha W. 92 Napoleonic W. 170, 173, 251, 255 see also under Napoleon {Index

personarum)

neo-Hobbesian w. 14 non-State w. 15 Oriental w. 102

pacifying w. 14 preventive w. 11 private w. 20, 25, 50, 116, 253, 256 racial

w.

176, 177

revolutionary w. savage

w.

87

91, 95

Seven Years' W. 78, 79 small w. 91 symmetrical w. 257 Thirty Years' W. 22, 25, 71, 74, 80, 86f., 253 total w. 14, 19 transcultural w. passim

Turkish w. (17,h century) 73, 76, 251 w. of aggression 11, 12, 141 w. of independence 90 w. of liberation 11,23, 170 w. of religion 20, 22,40, 71 w. of state formation

{Staatenbildungskrieg) 62, 83, 253 of unification 197 wild w. 13 World W.(s) 18, 19, 23, 59, 79, 85, 88, 95-99, 103, 197 w. without restraint 112 War Department 142 warfare 64, 112, 122, 128, 139, 151, 153, 162, 240 asymmetrical w. 103 Balkans w. 230 chivalric w. 124 civilised w. 95 crusading w. 45, 56 colonial w. 49, 91, 95 early modern w. 60 economic w. 86 European w. 57, 58, 68 frontier w. 55, 114 German w. 46 guerrilla (type) w. 49, 139, 215 inter-city w. 53 irregular w. 88 maritime w. 86 medieval w. 68 moslem w. 45 nomadic w. 220 phalanx w. 33 siege w. 47, 234 submarine w. 103 warlord 21, 253, 254,256 warriors 36,47, 65, 83, 89, 93, 102, 112, 115, 162 Equestrian w. 229 Hussite religious w. 65 Ottoman w. 65, 73 weapon(s) 85, 101, 103 weaponry 100 Wehrmacht 99, 242 w.

Zulu 93, 95, 103