by John Keegan
Zulu warriors charging with the stabbing assegai in the war of 1879. After their victory at Isandhwlana they were destroyed by British firepower.
A Partisan’s Mother, S. Gerasimov, 1943. This heroine of Socialist Realism defies the Nazi invader with a future partisan in her arms.
Japanese swordsmen and the art of the duel. The cult of the sword in Japan held the gunpowder revolution at bay until the Nineteenth Century.
A Mark IV Panzer of the Afrika Korps in the battle of El Agheila, April 1941. Free movement in the open desert was limited by logistics.
Mountain infantry of the Austro-Hungarian army scaling a peak in the Julian Alps. There was prolonged fighting in these ranges and in the Carpathians and Vosges in 1914–18.
German infantrymen manhandling a staff car across the roadless steppe in spring, 1942. The seasonal rasputitsa halts military movement in western Russia twice each year.
A future Yanomamö warrior. His weapon is a ‘simple’ bow which has not developed from its Stone Age origins.
A New Stone Age hunting scene from Alpéra, southern Spain. The bow may have appeared as a weapon about 12000 BC.
Egyptian archers from the tomb of Mesehti at Assiut, Middle Kingdom (1938– c. 1600 BC). Their lack of bodily protection indicates the tentative nature of early Egyptian warfare.
The Assyrian victors of the Chaldean campaign (late Seventh Century BC) counting heads. This was not a ritual but evidence of a new ruthlessness in war-making.
Aztec warriors in battle gear, as depicted by native artists in the Lienzo de Tlaxcala after the Conquest. Their feathered headbands indicate prowess in combat.
Sethos (Seti) I in battle with the Libyans at Karnak, Fourteenth Century BC. The coming of the chariot brought a novel intensity to Egyptian warfare.
The Palette of Narmer (Menes) shows the unifier of Lower and Upper Egypt, reckoned the first pharaoh (c. 3100 BC), despatching a captive.
Rameses II, in a similar pose seventeen centuries later, despatches a Nubian. Ritual slaughter may have been a feature of Egyptian, as of Aztec, warfare.
Assyrians hunting the large-horned ox from a chariot, Seventh Century BC. The chariot may originally have been developed for hunting.
The Standard of Ur, from the Sumerian kingdom, about 2500 BC. The war cart is drawn by onagers, not horses, and the warriors are wearing proto-armour.
Mounted Assyrian warriors of the reign of Shalmaneser III (858–24 BC). They ride without saddles and have not yet learnt the forward seat.
Assyrians in battle with Arabs, c. 650 BC. The Arabs are riding the recently domesticated camel, while the Assyrian archers now ride from the forward ‘control’ position.
A Sarmatian mounted warrior, kin to the Scythians who were enemies of Rome and Persia. His scale-armour points the way to the development of mail and plate.
Alexander the Great confronts Darius at the battle of Issus, 333 BC. The Persian emperor in his chariot flies from Alexander on Bucephalus in a graphic symbolisation of the cavalry revolution.
Iranian horsemen of the steppe, first millennium BC. Their elaborate horse-furniture indicates their mastery of their mounts, whose slender Caspian build anticipates that of the Arab horse.
The coming of the stirrup: mounted warriors of the Carolingian empire, from the St Gall Psalter, couch lances for the charge.
The walls of Jericho, excavated in 1956, which have been dated to 7000 BC. The fortifications also include a rock-cut dry moat and tower.
The Great Wall of China near Peking, in its reconstructed state. A strategic defence, it was constantly extended to protect the empire from the steppe nomads.
Hadrian’s Wall at its centre near Cuddy’s Crags. Begun in 122 AD, it is the best-preserved of the frontier fortifications of the Roman Empire.
Porchester Castle, a Norman stone-built keep inside a Roman fort of the Saxon Shore, one of the Empire’s major defensive systems.
Krak des Chevaliers, greatest of Crusader castles. The problem of the Christian knights was to find the garrisons for the strongholds they built.
The siege of Limerick, 1691; the plan shows ‘artillery’ bastions added to a mediaeval wall with towers, and the besiegers’ approaches, parallels and star earthworks. My Bridgman ancestors were given land nearby for service in this siege.
Warriors: the Zouave in the foreground is a Frenchman wearing the dress of a North African tribe, tribute to the reputation of ‘primitive warriors’ among Nineteenth-Century European armies.
Slave soldiers: Janissaries (‘new soldiers’) of the Ottoman Empire parading at Lake Van in the Sixteenth Century; Janissaries were enslaved by the Sultan from Christian children of the Balkans.
Militia: Swiss citizen soldiers on parade. Switzerland continues to make the performance of military service a condition — for males — of the enjoyment of electoral rights.
Mercenary: John Hawkwood, painted by Uccello in 1436, the English commander of the White Company, who sold his services to Florence, Milan and the papacy in the Fourteenth Century.
Regular: The Village Recruit, after Wilkie; drink, flattery and the King’s shilling tempt a landless labourer into long service in George III’s army.
Conscript: Londoners line up to register for compulsory military service at King’s Cross, May, 1939, on the eve of the Second World War.
The general principle held, however, that a multiplicity of strongholds indicated a weakness or absence of central authority. Alexander conducted at least twenty sieges between 335 and 325 but none within the confines of the Persian empire; as befitted a great state, its interior was defended at its periphery. Alexander’s three battles with the Persian army, at the Granicus, Issus and Gaugamela, were fought in open country. It was only when he had subdued Persia and pushed on into the fractious lands between it and India that he had to revert to the siegecraft he had practised when breaking into the empire during 334–2. The Romans conducted one siege after another when building their empire, from Agrigentum — one of the early fortified ports of Sicily — during the First Punic War in 262 BC to Alesia, a gigantic Celtic hill-fort, where Caesar overthrew Vercingetorix in 52 BC. They also, in the course of their advance from the Alps to Scotland and the Rhine, dotted the landscape with the rectangular legionary forts that their soldiers were trained to throw up at the end of each day’s march in hostile territory. These standardised designs — with their four gates and central ceremonial square they strangely resemble the classical Chinese city — also formed the model for the principal Roman cities of conquest: under the modern centres of London, Cologne and Vienna lie the remains of the square legionary forts on which they all grew up.
Within the pacified Roman empire, however, the conquerors did not fortify: ‘the majority of Gallic cities developed as open settlements and were left undefended’.11 That was what was meant by pax Romana — open cities, safe roads, the absence of internal boundaries over the great extent of western Europe. It was assured by fortification elsewhere, of course, though exactly how remains one of the most contentious issues in the writing of Roman history. The physical evidence of fortification at the frontiers is there for all to see, most visibly in the central stretches of Hadrian’s Wall. Traces of the Antonine Wall, by which the Romans marked an even deeper advance into north Britain, are still detectable, as are parts of the limes along the Rhine and the Danube, the fossatum Africae on the desert edge in Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya and the limes Syriae, which stretched from the Gulf of Aqaba and the north of the Red Sea to the headwaters of the Euphrates and Tigris. Were these ‘scientific frontiers’, as some modern historians think, or merely marks of the limits of effective control established by Roman armies campaigning to pre-empt the forces of disorder, some merely local, some strategically threatening, which they met at the effective economic boundaries of the Mediterranean world? Edward Luttwak, in his The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire, has successfully propagated the belief that the Romans, like the British in India, firmly conceived a sch
eme of what could and could not be defended, though varying the method by which it was defended in practice — strong central army first, then strong local defence, finally an unsatisfactory mixture of the two — as their fortunes dictated.12 Luttwak’s opponents deny any such consistency, particularly where the eastern frontiers were concerned. Benjamin Isaac believes that Rome sustained an aggressive policy against Persia and Parthia over a very long period, and that the fortifications in the east should therefore be seen as defended lines of communication for expeditionary armies; C.R. Whittaker thinks that there were permanent local troubles on many frontiers and that Roman defences, like those of the Egyptians in Nubia or the French in Algeria during the war of 1954–62 (the Morice Line), were principally intended to keep malefactors at arm’s length from peaceful cultivators.13
What is certain is that the growth of central authority was almost everywhere and at all times marked by the construction of strategic defences, from those as simple as Offa’s Dyke between Anglo-Saxon England and Celtic Wales — though a mighty undertaking it must have been in its time, consuming tens of thousands of man-digging days — to the still-unravelled complexities of the Great Wall of China. The exact function of such defences is more difficult to define, varying so much as to defy generalisation. Thus the Habsburg Military Frontier with the Ottoman lands — the krajina — was certainly meant to keep the Turks out; but building it was a tribute more to Turkish strength than to that of Austria, though the Habsburgs were the older dynasty. By contrast, the chain of fortresses erected at great expense to protect the British ports on the south and east coasts in the 1860s (seventy-six were completed or under construction by 1867) was a response to a phantom threat from France, perhaps evidence of a neurotic distrust of the power of ironclad warships to supply the defence which the English had always confidently expected from wooden walls.14 Louis XIV’s chain of fortresses along the eastern border of France was an aggressive device, designed to extend French power step-by-step into the Habsburg lands; even more so was the cherta, a line of improvised fortifications pushed eastward by the tsars from the sixteenth century on into the wild lands of the steppe, intended to press the nomads south of the Ural mountains and to open a path of settlement into Siberia. The cherta could only be extended, however, with the half-willing assistance of the Cossacks, and one of its functions, which they were slow to perceive, was that of bringing their free settlements under Muscovite control.15
That prescription — half defensive, half oppressive — describes, in the view of Owen Lattimore, who with Frederick Jackson Turner was the greatest of frontier historians, the role of China’s Great Wall. Turner, in a famous paper of 1893 to the American Historical Association, argued that the idea of the moving frontier, which offered free land to anyone prepared to venture westward, had been decisive in shaping the American national character — exuberant, energetic and inquisitive — and in assuring that the United States would remain a great democracy. Lattimore, by contrast, represented the Great Wall as a different sort of frontier in every way. Admittedly it moved: beginning by the interconnection of a number of local walls, raised by regional rulers to protect their embryo states, its line was eventually fixed along the boundary between the soils of irrigated agriculture and those of pastoralism — roughly river valley and steppe — by the Chin dynasty in the third century BC. Neither they, however, nor any subsequent dynasty, in Lattimore’s view, could get the line of the Great Wall right: sometimes it pushed northward to enclose the Ordos plateau in the great bend of the Yellow River, sometimes that was abandoned, while there were numerous extensions to and realignments of its western end where it reached out toward the Tibetan plateau; eventually all its arms and branches ran to a total length of nearly 4000 miles.16 Lattimore argues that all these twists and turns are evidence less of the waning or waxing power of dynasties than of the pursuit of a chimera. Successive emperors did indeed seek a ‘scientific’ frontier, on the line where land suitable for peasant farming met that which ought to be abandoned to the herding nomads. No such line, however, was to be found, since the two zones were not only separated by one of mixed ecology, but that third zone itself shifted with changes of climate — desiccation, humidification — in the interior of the great Eurasian land mass. Attempts to dictate ecology by colonising the border zone with peasant Chinese produced a Schlimmbesserung — worsening by improvement. The settlers, particularly those implanted in the great bend of the Yellow River, tended to nomadise themselves when desiccation set in and thus to swell the numbers of the horse peoples who beat in successive waves against the Wall; offensives by the horse peoples also undid the efforts of the frontier commanders to sinicise the semi-nomads whose natural home the inter-zone was.17
It was not surprising, in the circumstances, that the Chinese never unwalled the cities around which their irrigated settlements had first grown up. In times of dynastic strength they served as centres of imperial administration; during periods of turmoil, brought on by nomadic assaults on the throne, they remained sanctuaries of the imperial tradition which always reasserted itself to tame and sinicise the conquerors. City walls were rightly regarded as symbols of civilisation — under the Ming (AD 1368–1644) 500 were completely reconstructed — as was the Great Wall itself.18 Both, however, were no more than props to the imperial system, whose ultimate strength reposed in the philosophical beliefs of the Chinese about how society should properly be ordered. Such beliefs could retain their force not so much because they permeated society from top to bottom — they tended to remain the cultural property of the land-owning and official class — as because the numbers of outsiders who succeeded to power were comparatively small, and came from steppe societies which, to an extent that they themselves did not often recognise, had themselves been subtly sinicised by sustained contact with the target civilisation at its fortified edge. In that sense, the Great Wall was itself a civilising instrument, a diaphragm through which potent ideas flowed outward to moderate the barbarism of those who beat perpetually at the gates.
The classical civilisation of the West was not so lucky. Unlike the Chinese, the Romans were assaulted by a sustained surge of barbarians in very large numbers, too few of whom had been romanised by continuous and mediating contact with civilisation to ensure its preservation. From the middle of the third century AD, as barbarian raiders struck more frequently and deeply into Gaul, provincial officials began to wall inland towns; even by the fifth century, however, only forty-eight cities had been fortified, mostly in frontier or coastal areas; in Spain only twelve had been walled, while in Italy south of the Po valley Rome alone retained its defences.19 Chains of forts were thrown up along the North Sea, Channel and Atlantic coasts, and the limes down the Rhine and Danube were strengthened. Once these frontier defences were overrun, the western empire lay ripe for the taking. The barbarian kingdoms that succeeded to Rome did not at first need, even had they known how, to fortify. Successive irruptions by wholly unromanised intruders — Scandinavian sea raiders, Arabs, Central Asian steppe peoples — met no strategic defences to bar the way and few internal fortifications. Little wonder that Charlemagne’s brave effort to recreate a pan-European state was whittled away piecemeal by their assaults.
Eventually western Europe was re-fortified, but in a pattern that would have rightly caused a Chinese dynasty nothing but alarm. The mysterious revival of trade between 1100 and 1300, itself perhaps due to an equally mysterious rise in the European population from about 40,000,000 to about 60,000,000, in turn revived the life of towns, which through the growth of a money economy won the funds to protect themselves from dangers beyond the walls; Pisa, for example, surrounded itself by a ditch dug in two months in 1155 and completed a continuous wall with towers the following year. The newly walled towns, however, used their immunity not to underpin royal authority but to demand rights and freedoms; Pisa was walled as an act of defiance against the emperor Frederick Barbarossa.20 Meanwhile, in a process the Chinese emperors would have found eve
n more alarming, local strongmen were busily covering the face of western Europe with castles, at first simple entrenchments, then from the tenth century onward more dominating mottes, finally true stone strongholds. Some of these places were owned by a king or his trusted vassals, but progressively the majority must be classified as the illegal (‘adulterine’) creations of the disobedient or upstart. Their justification was always that threats from the ungodly — Vikings or Avars or Magyars — required them to have a secure place in which to stable their warhorses and house their men-at-arms. The reality was that, in a Europe which lacked both strategic defences and strong central authorities, they were profiting from circumstances to make themselves local overlords.
Castellation on such a scale — there were three castles in the Poitou region of France before the Vikings began to raid, thirty-nine by the eleventh century; none in Maine before the tenth century, sixty-two by 1100; and the pattern repeats itself elsewhere — eventually cancelled out the advantage it gave in local struggles for power.21 When every strong man kept his court armed, the result was not overlordship, and mutual support of central authority against intruders even less, but endemic local warfare. Kings issued licences for castles and, with their great vassals, overthrew the adulterine whenever they could. Castles, however, could be built very quickly — a hundred men might throw up a small motte in ten days — but a castle once built was much more difficult to reduce if its castellan dug in his heels.22 The strength of castles greatly exceeded the force of siegecraft, a truth not to be overturned until the coming of gunpowder and that had held good since the building of Jericho.