Blink and You’ll Miss it: Medieval Warfare in Victor Davis Hanson’s Carnage and Culture John D. Hosler Morgan State University In 2001, Victor Davis Hanson, a historian who, according to John Keegan, “is becoming one of the best-known historians in America,” published the controversial book Carnage and Culture.1 Its central argument is that a definitive “western way of war” can be traced through history, from the Persian Wars of the fifth century B.C. to the modern day. Western military culture in this sense is identified by a number of salient features: political freedom and the ability to debate strategy through a free exchange of ideas; the invention, fabrication, and development of lethal weaponry, enabled through the existence of a capitalistic economy; training and bravery tempered by strict military discipline; and finally, western lethality of killing as typically expressed in mass field confrontations, shock combat, and masses of heavily-armed infantry groups.2 It is thus the larger culture of Western armies, what he refers to as “civic militarism,” that has allowed them to triumph even when faced with the usual impediments to victory, such as weather, location, supplies, or numbers.3 To prove his thesis, Hanson analyses nine significant battles fought between “western” and “eastern” armies, broadly construed. These battles, he states, were selected “for what they tell us about culture, specifically the core elements of Western civilization.”4 Nine battles seems too small a number for the course of 2,500 years of military history, and the list of battles is both top and bottom-heavy in a chronological sense. Given Hanson’s expertise as a historian of the ancient world, it is not surprising that three of the nine battles predate Christ: Salamis, Gaugamela, and Cannae. Three more occurred in 1879 or later: Rorke’s Drift, Midway, and Tet. The remaining three battles are left to fill the void in between the Roman Republic and the Age of Imperialism, a span of over 2000 years. Of these, two are in the 16th century (Tenochtitlan, Lepanto), and third is the Battle of Poitiers in 732. 1 Quote from rear cover blurb, V.D. Hanson, Carnage and Culture (New York, 2001). 2 These aspects are addressed throughout the chapters, but see Carnage and Culture, 444-46, for a good summation. 3 Carnage and Culture, 441. 4 Carnage and Culture, 11. 1  Several reviewers have noted the striking omissions that result from such a spread-out sampling. Absent are such periods as late-Republican Rome and Julius Caesar, the entire Roman Empire, the Eastern or Byzantine Empire, most of the Middle Ages, the Thirty Years War, Napoleonic Europe, and all Euro-Asian warfare before the 20th century, to name just the major examples. I suspect that most specialists could find cause for complaint in that their favorite subjects are somewhat neglected in the book. To his credit, Hanson foresaw such objections and addressed them in his Epilogue, acknowledging that several other battles from other periods and theaters might also have been included.5 I do not today intend to challenge the larger thesis of Hanson’s book; indeed, I actually agree with many of his points on western military culture. Instead, I would like to address one element of concern in Carnage and Culture, this being Victor Davis Hanson’s comments of the European Middle Ages. It is not a question of coverage: he does offer a chapter on early Carolingian warfare by discussing Poitiers, and, in his response to one review, freely states that chapters on Byzantine warfare and even the Crusades would have been interesting and useful, had he the time and space to devote to such topics.6 I am inclined to take him at his word, and I have no doubt that he could write a second volume to Carnage and Culture that takes into account battles from additional periods and locales. Rather, my subject for today is Hanson’s description of medieval warfare. He, along with a number of other military historians who wrote reviews of the book, has failed to engage with the significant research on medieval warfare that has taken place in the last half century. The result is a broadly marketed and widely distributed mischaracterization of medieval military history. I will first address the pertinent reviews of the book then discuss Hanson’s conception of medieval warfare; finally, I will offer some thoughts on the usefulness of his broad theory. 5 Carnage and Culture, 443 6 Hanson, “Hanson’s Reply I,” Arion: a Journal of Humanities and the Classics 10:2 (2002): 150. 2 THE REVIEWS Carnage and Culture has tended to draw out either outright praise or harsh criticisms and, at times, ad hominem attacks, but few reviewers have noticed the absence of any substantive treatment of medieval warfare. Among Hanson’s biggest fans is Geoffrey Parker. In addition to a very positive review printed in the New York Times on 12 August 2001, Parker made the book required reading for his graduate seminar on “The Rise of Western Dominance” at Ohio State University.7 Parker does not address the lack of medieval history in the book. This is not so surprising: Parker’s adherence to the so-called “military revolution” of the sixteenth century has drawn criticism from medievalists who believe he fails to recognize the formation of large-scale armies and early-modern tactics not in the sixteenth but rather the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and perhaps even before that. Another ringing endorsement of Carnage and Culture is Keith Windschuttle in the April 2002 issue of New Criterion. Windschuttle himself is no stranger to controversy, having published a revisionist history of the aborigines in Australia as well as the aggressively titled The Killing of History: How a Discipline is being Murdered by Literary Critics and Social Theorists. This latter book, incidentally, is included in Hanson’s notes as a recommended text.8 Windschuttle detects a lack of coverage of medieval warfare, suggesting that that Hanson might have spent more time on “the clash between Islam and medieval Europe.” The context suggests that he was thinking, however, specifically about Byzantium and the fall of Constantinople in 1453, not the military history of Western Europe.9 The most negative review of Carnage and Culture to date is that of Steven Willett, published in a 2002 issue of the classics journal Arion. There is no love lost between Willet and Hanson: following Willett’s review, Hanson responded in the very next issue of Arion, addressing multiple points of contention and claimed the overly harsh critique stemmed from Willett’s personal enmity towards him.10 7 G. Parker, “The Way of the West,” New York Times (Aug. 12, 2001). 8 Carnage and Culture, 467. 9 K. Windschuttle, “Why the West Wins Wars,” New Criterion 20:8 (April 2002). 10 J. Black, “Determinisms and Other Issues,” Journal of Military History 68:4 (2004), 1226; S. J. Willett, “History from the Clouds: Victor Davis Hanson’s Carnage and Culture,” Arion: a Journal of Humanities and the Classics 10:1 (2002): 157-78. Hanson’s first response to the review appeared in Arion 10:2 (2002): 145-57; Willett’s rejoinder and Hanson’s second response are “Willett’s Rejoinder” and “Hanson’s Reply II,” Arion Forum (Feb. 10, 2003), <http://www.bu.edu/arion/forum.htm>, Apr. 3 One of Willet’s criticisms is that Hanson neglected medieval warfare in Carnage and Culture. Like Windschuttle, Willett centers particularly on the absence of Byzantine warfare.11 More criticisms of Hanson are leveled by Jeremy Black in two publications. First, in an article about military determinisms published in this Society’s own Journal of Military History in October 2004, Black questioned the accuracy of Hanson’s details in Carnage and Culture. Black did not deign to discuss the matter further in that piece, citing instead the critical review by Steven Willett just mentioned. Later, however, Black revisits the point raised by Windschuttle and Willett on Byzantine warfare in his book Rethinking Military History. Black complains that Hanson “failed to engage” with the Middle Ages and especially Byzantium.12 So here we have two serious critiques about Hanson’s lack of coverage. As I’ve already stated, such critiques have only superficial value: of course Hanson could have covered more historical periods and other modes and traditions of warfare, but the intent of Carnage and Culture is not that of a universal history. For a medievalist such as myself, I sympathize with Black’s position, but his noble words are not completely earnest. Pointedly addressing the need to avoid Eurocentric historical analysis, in his 2004 book Rethinking Military History Black questions whether medieval warfare “deserves [even] the relative attention it receives” in the overall consideration of military history. Its supposed lack of merit stems from two deficiencies. First, Black argues that medieval warfare had a limited transformative impact on warfare elsewhere. Second, he argues that medieval campaigns were on a smaller scale than those waged in Asia. This latter point is extended into an argument that Crusading warfare contributed less to military technique than Asiatic tribal armies such as the Turks and Mongols. Although a focus on strictly western medieval warfare might offer limited results, he allows that studies concerned with the de-westernizing of warfare and/or its encounters with eastern cultures might be worthwhile.13 10, 2007. 11 Willett, “History from the Clouds,” 164. 12 J. Black, Rethinking Military History (London, 2004), 95. 13 Rethinking Military History, 238-40. 4  So in the case of Carnage and Culture, is it Hanson’s lack of detail or coverage that irritates Jeremy Black, or is it the book’s focus on the West? It is the latter. Yet in the end, whether we speak of Hanson’s mischaracterization of the period or Black’s insistence that the Middle Ages don’t figure much into the scope of global military history, neither author addresses the historical role of medieval warfare in the so-called “western way of war.” HANSON’S MIDDLE AGES I’d like to now turn to what Hanson actually says about the Middle Ages. To his credit, Hanson does indeed tackle the period in his fifth chapter, titled “Landed Infantry,” which covers the Battle of Poitiers (or Tours), the contest between Charles Martel’s Frankish army and the Arabic warriors of Abd ar-Rahman in 732. In this chapter and then in other places in the text, Hanson argues that the Greco- Roman reliance upon heavy infantry continued after the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century and persisted throughout the Middle Ages. He breaks the period into three major chunks of time. First, there was the pejoratively titled “Dark Ages” from 500 to 800. Next came the two centuries between 800 and 1000, what he calls “a relatively isolated and somewhat backward era, when Europeans fought off the invasions of northern and eastern nomads and Muslims.” Finally, there is the period 1300-1600, which he refers to as “the spread of gunpowder.”14 This chronology is provided on page 19 of Carnage and Culture and thus presents an immediate problem: what happened to the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries? This stretch of time, otherwise known as the High or Central Middle Ages, was critical to the development of medieval warfare and featured several elements that stand in challenge of Hanson’s theory. “Shock Combat” Hanson states in his Introduction that the selected battles in Carnage and Culture reveal “how a society fights.” They are meant as snapshots, not as progressive steps in the development of warfare.15 14 Carnage and Culture, 19. 15 Carnage and Culture, 11. 5 Unfortunately, snapshots—images of particular moments in time—do not always reveal the full story. It is sometimes unclear whether Hanson is speaking in terms of strategy or tactics. While medieval battles could be impressive affairs, the strategy of the period, especially after the year 1000, was bent more on the avoidance of battle than direct confrontations in the field. Battle as a means of conquest or defense was not the preferred strategy of most medieval commanders. Open battle was too risky: medieval armies tended towards smaller numbers of combatants, and the loss of an army could be politically devastating. As an alternative, commanders conducted ravaging operations, dominated off chunks of territory with castles and fortified towns, besieged enemy fortifications, and fought logistical campaigns to reduce an enemy’s material assets. This is the modern understanding of medieval warfare, and it is one that continues to be ignored by non-medievalists. Consider Geoffrey Parker’s description of early-modern warfare, summarized in his book The Military Revolution: [it] involved far more sieges than battles… ‘actions’ between men with firearms in and around the trenches proved far more common than full-scale encounters decided by sabre and lance in the field.16 Remove the firearms and replace the trenches with stone walls, and this sounds like a description of medieval warfare, in which sieges were also more common than battle. In this regard, a major tradition of medieval warfare carried into the early-modern period was one of defensive strategy, not open battle. Interestingly enough, Hanson seems to agree by admitting at one point that, “[sieges and defending walls were]—far more likely the locus of medieval warring than the open battlefield.”17 It is curious that he does not delve deeper into this issue, which sternly challenges his views on the primacy of shock combat. “Landed Infantry” Hanson depicts medieval infantry as entirely vital to the conduct of medieval war. They conducted sieges, defended walls, took possession of land, and constituted the dominant force in the 16 G. Parker, The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500-1800, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, 1996), 155. 17 Carnage and Culture, 165. 6 field.18 Because cavalry had difficulty breaking formed lines of foot soldiers, he argues that small groups of horse would instead slip through cracks in the lines or chase down fleeing opponents during the rout. Such opportunities existed only through the strident efforts of the heavy infantry in the field.19 All this has some validity, but Hanson’s misstep is that all of his infantry examples are based on armies of the eighth and ninth centuries. For example, he quotes John Beeler’s 1971 description of Carolingian infantry: “each free household owed the service of a man with complete arms and equipment…the Frankish army thus became a levy of free men serving at the king’s will.”20 His choice of the Battle of Poitiers seems quite deliberate: Charles Martel was an aggressive campaigner who sought frequently conducted battle; as such, he is an exceptional example.21 Most medieval commanders were of a lesser offensive mindset. Using the example of Charles Martel and the makeup of his army, Hanson extrapolates erroneously from Carolingian practices and projects obligated citizen soldiers through the rest of the Middle Ages. Medievalists, however, have argued that the image of wide-spread civic militarism is a gross over- exaggeration. This is clearly presented in one book highlighted by Hanson as a suggested reading, John France’s Western Warfare in the Age of the Crusades, 1000-1300. Hanson may have delighted in France’s statement that, “most of those who fought on foot in medieval armies…served from personal obligation as men of a king or lord.” However, France continues: It has long been assumed that there was, in most of Europe, an obligation on all freemen to serve in arms, and that this formed the basis of large infantry forces, at least in the earlier part of our period. […] But doubt has been cast upon the idea of a “nation in arms,” [in England] […] If we turn to the continental evidence, we can see that the notion…also rests on very limited evidence […] if there had ever been an ancient and universal obligation to bear arms, it was largely forgotten by the start of this period and was something that the rulers of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries tried to invent for their own purposes.22 18 Carnage and Culture, 164-65. 19 Carnage and Culture, 152. 20 Carnage and Culture, 164. 21 J.F. Verbruggen, The Art of Warfare in Western Europe during the Middle Ages, trans. S. Willard and S.C.M. Southern (Woodbridge, 1997), 20-22. 22 J. France, Western Warfare in the Age of the Crusades, 1000-1300 (Ithaca, 1999), 65-66. 7 In regions with feudal customs such as England post-1066 and France, the system of obligation varied tremendously. Most documented obligations did not apply to infantry but rather cavalry. Specific systems existed for the gathering of infantry forces, such as King Henry II’s Assize of Arms, which required the arming of citizens—even those without property.23 Even once equipped, there is no scholarly consensus over whether or not such armed citizens were actually used on campaign. In the Holy Roman Empire, where feudal oaths were not customary from the Ottonian period forward, imperial soldiers were acquired from church lands. Here, the question of the “free citizen” is blurred and the investing of local bishops seems just as integral to military organization as the will of the emperor. Further complicating the tradition of landed infantry was the increasing use of foreign mercenaries, reasonably evident from the mid-eleventh century onward. In Anglo-Norman and Angevin armies, mercenaries were bought with monies collected through scutage, a “shield-tax” that replaced personal obligations. Here, then, we have “citizen soldiers” choosing not to fight and leaving the fate of the campaign (and the prosperity of their lord) in the hands of soldiers-for-hire. This hardly resembles the Greco-Roman tradition of civic militarism as Hanson would have us understand it. “Religious Zealots” In terms of the clash of eastern and western cultures featured throughout Carnage and Culture, the High Middle Ages was also the period of the Crusades. Over a period more than 200 years, different sorts of Western armies met different sorts of Islamic forces. Towards the end of his chapter on Poitiers, Hanson acknowledges the military achievement of the crusaders by arguing that only Europeans could have assembled and transported large armies to the Holy Land during the Crusades.24 Yet in his Introduction, he argues that the Crusaders themselves were “religious zealots” that departed from the standard formula of western armies being an extension of state politics.25 23 “Assize of Arms,” English Historical Documents II: 1142-1189, eds. D.C. Douglas and G. Greenaway (London, 1953), 416. 24 And, seemingly suggest, erroneously so, that the First Crusade went by way of the sea; see Carnage and Culture, 168. 25 Carnage and Culture, 22. 8  Missing is the link between the gathering of such huge but zealous armies: Christianity. It was no policy of state that prompted Pope Urban II to preach the crusade at Clermont, and it was for the benefit of no particular government that French warriors took the cross. The crusaders themselves were both landed and un-landed knights and foot soldiers. The dominant theory today, as explicated by the New Cambridge school of thought, is that religious devotion played a principal role in the promotion of the First Crusade. Until the creation of largely-independent states in the late thirteenth century, the Church was much more of a unifying force in the Middle Ages than any guarantor of local citizenship. Further, “citizenship” itself is too slippery a term for the period: it presumes that people fought to preserve their political system or rights under said system. Medieval knights often fought purely for their own land or out of vindictiveness and against their peers but also their social betters. It is this private warfare that spurred on the Peace and Truce of God movements in the tenth and eleventh centuries: both of which sought to channel and redirect baronial and knightly violence away from fellow Christians and towards the infidel in Spain. Whatever his editorial choices in terms of examples or analysis, Hanson’s thesis cannot be proven until the tradition of Christian ideas and institutions influencing the conduct of warfare is addressed. CONCLUSION What, then, to make of Carnage and Culture and Victor Davis Hanson’s theory of the western way of war? I will admit that the book has captured my interest like few others. Like Geoffrey Parker, I assign portions of it to my students, and I have found its authors’ analysis insightful and quite valuable in the teaching of world history. I do not agree with such dramatic reviews as Stephen Willett’s, in which he argues that Carnage and Culture is “a dangerously misleading book.”26 Instead, I think it is simply misleading. When it comes to the Middle Ages, the problem is neither Victor Davis Hanson nor his reviewers have stayed current with recent research in the field. There may be ways to connect medieval warfare to his theory on the western way of war, but unless he confronts head-on the defining 26 See “Willett’s Rejoinder.” 9 characteristics of the entire period—the Church, medieval strategy, norms of combat, the Crusades, etc.— it remains difficult to trace an unbroken western military tradition from Marathon to Bosworth. 10