by John Keegan
These innovations were timely, for during the ninth century a new wave of assaults on the West began that could not have been withstood by the cumbersome, infrequently summoned and largely horseless warrior hosts of the post-Roman successor kingdoms. These assaults had three points of origin: the Islamic lands, the steppe and the still pagan and barbarian coasts of Scandinavia. From the Islamic lands was mounted a regime of Mediterranean piracy and despoliation which recalled that of the Vandals in the sixth century and depended on the use of the same North African ports. The Saracens, as the Islamic intruders became known to the West, operated as freely as they did because, since the dissolution of the Roman fleet in the fifth century, there had been no state navy in the western Mediterranean to protect the coasts and ensure safe use of the sea. In 827 Sicily, so often before the point d’appui for powers on the rampage — Athens, Carthage, the Vandals — was occupied; shortly afterward pirates set up bases in the toe of Italy and in southern France; in the tenth century Corsica, Sardinia and even Rome were attacked. Eventually the Saracens were driven out of southern Italy by the efforts of the Byzantines, the only power still to maintain a galley fleet, but only after they had pillaged and destroyed, often deep inland, from the Rhône to the Adriatic.
The threat from the steppe was mounted by the Magyars who, displaced westward by the rising power of the Turks, appeared in the Danubian plain, Attila’s former grazing-land, in 862. From it they launched a series of typical, but even by Hunnish standards extraordinarily far-ranging nomad raids, which in 898 carried them into Italy and drew Berenger, King of Italy, and his army of 15,000 armoured horsemen into a disastrous battle on the River Brenta in September 899. In 910, they confronted the general levy of the East Franks, called by the last Carolingian emperor, Louis the Child, near Augsburg and won a great victory that allowed them for the next ten years to roam in Germany largely at will. Henry the Fowler, king of Germany in 919–36, gradually constricted their depradations by extensive fortress-building on the eastern frontier, but they nevertheless managed to penetrate as far as France and Burgundy in 924 and 926 and, despite a defeat at his hands in 933, again into Italy in 954. The following year Otto I, Holy Roman emperor, at last found sufficient force at a moment of opportunity to fix and fight them against an obstacle, one of the few means by which heavy cavalry could crush the much more mobile light cavalry in combat. With an 8000-man army of mostly Bavarians and Swabians, sizeable for the time, he bypassed their camp outside Augsburg, which they were besieging, crossed the River Lech to bar their line of retreat and awaited attack. The Magyars, who like the Huns had retained the composite bow as their principal weapon and the loose steppe swarm as their tactical formation, despite their long acquaintance with the western style of warmaking, did as Henry hoped. Crossing the Lech to fight for an escape route, they were drawn into a confused battle with their backs to the river and ridden down to destruction by their armoured enemies. The scattered remnants were harried home by the armed people of the countryside and were never again able to mount a major raid out of the Hungarian plain into the cultivated lands of the west.74
The Scandinavians could not be so summarily despatched, for their assaults were launched by a means to which none of the west European kingdoms had an antidote, the sea-going warship. The peoples of the north European coasts had been adventurous seafarers for centuries; the Romans had maintained a fleet on the ‘Saxon Shore’ in Britain and Gaul to keep their piracy in check; it was the collapse of that fleet in the fifth century that had allowed the Angles, Saxons and Jutes to settle Britain from Denmark and north Germany.75 The emptying of the lands beyond the Rhine in the barbarian migrations then brought on a lull in maritime emigration, but at the end of the eighth century land hunger in Norway and Sweden impelled the pagan northerners to renew their search for places of settlement, for loot and for opportunities to trade on dictated terms, and this was at precisely the moment when they had perfected a ship that would carry warriors long distances over stormy seas. The keys to the longship’s superiority over contemporary coast-hugging craft were its narrow profile and deep keel, allowing it to be sailed to windward, together with its broad cross-section amidships, which made it suitable to row when winds failed and to beach on the open coast away from defended ports.76
In short, it was the perfect ship for sea raiders, always provided that they were hardy enough to bear the discomforts of long passages in an uncovered hull on cold rations between stopping-places. The Vikings — so called from the Norse Viking, piracy — were among the hardiest and most warlike peoples ever to assault civilisation, their terrifying readiness to close to hand-to-hand combat heightened in a century of land quarrels that preceded their era of voyaging.77 Moreover, from about 840 onward they began to ship horses, thereby giving them the means to mount deep inland raids from unexpected directions that outwitted local defenders. Beginning with their first descent upon the monastery of Lindisfarne in northern England in 793 the Vikings ventured ever farther afield, raiding Seville in Muslim Spain in 844 and pushing deep into the Mediterranean in 859. In 834 they devastated the great trading-place of Dorstadt, at the mouth of the Rhine, and by 877 began an invasion of Anglo-Saxon England that eventually made the whole of the midlands and north into a Danish overseas kingdom by the mid-tenth century. Wider voyaging — which by astonishing leaps of navigation, akin in their daring to those of the Pacific Polynesians, carried them to Iceland in 870, and to Greenland in the next century — somewhat relieved the relentlessness of their assaults on western Europe, but it did not limit their intrusions in the ungoverned lands of central and eastern Europe. The Vikings, there known as ‘Rus’, took to a life of armed trading, from Sweden across the Baltic and thence down the great Russian rivers that led them into contact with Islam and Byzantium. In the west the Norsemen, at the same time as they were conquering central England, seized a foothold in northern France, which in 911 the king was obliged to cede to them as a fief. From this acquisition, Normandy, the Normans in the eleventh century conquered England in 1066 and from 1027 onward established near Naples the outposts of their future kingdom in Italy and Sicily.
Military means alone could not have sufficed to contain the devastations wrought by the various raiders of the ninth and tenth centuries. Western Europe stood in need, as China did in the face of the steppe nomads, of some cultural force with which to neutralise their nihilism and assimilate them within the governed world. The Saracens could not be assimilated; they raided and pillaged with the moral assurance of the ghazi, Islam’s frontier warriors. The pagan Vikings and Magyars, however, still resided in the primitive world of vengeful or unlistening gods to which the Teutons and steppe peoples belonged before they heard the word of Christ or Muhammad. The Christian church had already achieved an extraordinary work of pacification in western Europe, beginning with the conversion of the Franks in 496, and it had progressively brought all the invaders of the Roman lands within a single faith; it brought them also to respect the Christian institutions — papacy, episcopate, monastic foundations — that survived from Rome and, by a heroic mission, as much civilising as religious, carried Roman Christianity north and eastward to the farther Germans and Slavs. Conversion had often been imposed at the point of the sword, but Christian men and women, like the English St Boniface, Apostle of the Germans, had also died as martyrs in the effort to plant the word among savage peoples. It was by such means that the Magyars were converted by the end of the tenth century, after which Hungary became a bastion of resistance to steppe invasions, and the Scandinavians by the eleventh and twelfth.
A post-Roman Europe without the Roman church would have been a barbarous place indeed; the remnants of Roman civil institutions were too weak to provide a framework for a reconstitution of order, and in the absence of disciplined armies, the whole continent might have fallen back below the ‘military horizon’ into endemic conflict over territory and tribal rights. There were limits, however, to what the Church could achieve in its work of pacif
ication, which derived in almost equal measure from its aspirations to power for itself and its doctrinal inhibitions about how power in practice is exercised in the world. In the east the Christian bishops persisted in the Constantian practice of deferring to the Byzantine emperor; in the formerly Christian lands that fell to Islam, religious and secular authority united in the person of the caliph. But in the west the papacy resisted either such accommodation. Successor to Rome and seated in Rome, the papacy sought from the moment of Rome’s fall to establish the distinction between worldly and religious authority and to justify the subordination of the former to the latter. Charlemagne restored the Roman empire in name by the sword, but his title as emperor owed its legitimacy in the eyes of the popes to his coronation by Leo III at the see of St Peter.
While emperors were strong and popes weak, at least in worldly terms, no conflict between the power of the one and the claims to authority of the other arose. By the eleventh century, however, the Church had everywhere grown more wealthy and more confident. Its lands, often acquired by charitable bequest, supplied rulers with many of their military fiefs; its monastic institutions, equally founded on charitable legacies, became centres of a strong theology that found the arguments to reinforce papal claims to primacy. Such arguments deprecated the development of the practice by which emperor and kings, who appointed or ‘invested’ bishops and abbots to their offices, used pliant men as instruments of civil government, notably in the raising and maintenance of military forces. Theologians reluctantly conceded the morality of combat when conducted to impose or restore a sovereign’s lawful rights; Christ’s admonition to ‘render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s’ provided, by enlargement, the necessary justification. Nevertheless, it held both killing and wounding to be a sin for which penance must be done — after Hastings in 1066 the Norman bishops imposed on their own knights a year’s prayer and fasting for killing a man, forty days for wounding one — even though William the Conqueror had fought Harold and the Anglo-Saxons with the pope’s approval of his claim that he was seeking restitution of his sovereign rights.78 In the great ‘investiture conflict’ between Pope Gregory VII and the Holy Roman emperor Henry IV, in the eleventh century, whose manifest issue was that of precedence in appointing bishops, Gregory showed no reluctance at all in concerting an alliance of Normans and Germans to fight against the emperor. Forever in the background, however, lurked the Christian doubt of how Christ’s blessing of the peacemakers might be reconciled with the impulse of the man on horseback, even if he rode under a papal banner, to yield to blood lust when he confronted a fellow soul, sword in hand.
It was a matter of conscience that could not be avoided in Europe where half of the upper society that did not labour wore godly cloth while the other half wore armour and kept warhorses. The knightly class of the eleventh century was still rough-hewn and the manners of chivalry lay in the future.79 Only 200 years earlier the Carolingian decree that ‘every man who had a horse should come mounted to the host’ had ‘brought with the ranks of the landed nobility a horde of upstart adventurers, whose chief title to nobility … was they rode a noble beast’. Europe remained a warrior society at heart. The law of God fell on deaf ears when men’s blood was up and when the civil law had no wider jurisdiction than a lord’s power to impose the rights that in title it gave him.
It was therefore a relief to Church and kings alike when at the end of the eleventh century the quarrel over investiture was overlaid by a new call to arms against a common, un-Christian enemy. A new pope, Urban II, a monk of Cluny, one of the monasteries where the theology of papal power had its seat, was elected in 1088 and at once set out by diplomacy to restore good relations with the Holy Roman emperor; at the same time he began to preach the sinfulness of Christian fighting Christian. At the Council of Clermont in 1095 he recalled the idea of the Truce of God, the armistice of Lent and holy days, and went on to urge that Christians should ‘leave off slaying each other and fight instead a righteous war’. He reminded his listeners that, in the wake of the disaster of Manzikert twenty-four years earlier, the Byzantines had appealed to the West to come to the defence of Christendom in the East, that the Muslim Turks were continuing their advance into the Christian lands and that the holy city, Jerusalem, was in Muslim hands. He appealed for a campaign to be mounted without delay to restore it to the Church.80
The idea of ‘Crusade’, for that was what Urban launched, was already in the air. During the tenth century the Muslims of Spain, under the dynamic al-Mansur, had won territory from the tiny Christian kingdoms that survived in the northern part of the Iberian peninsula, and devout young knights from elsewhere in Europe, including Normans, Italians and Frenchmen, went there to fight; they were encouraged by the abbots of Cluny, who took a special interest in the welfare of pilgrims to the threatened shrine of the apostle James at Compostela; patron of the expedition of 1073 was Gregory VII, papal protagonist in the investiture conflict, who while reminding the world that ‘the kingdom of Spain belonged to the see of St Peter, declared that Christian knights might enjoy the lands they conquered from the infidel’. Thus
by the close of the eleventh century the idea of the holy war had been carried into practice. Christian knights and soldiers were encouraged by the authorities of the Church to leave their petty quarrels and to journey to the frontiers of Christendom to fight against the infidel. To reward them for their service they might take possession of the lands they reconquered and they received spiritual benefits … [Moreover] the Papacy was taking the direction of the holy wars. It often launched them and named the commander. The land that was conquered had to be held under ultimate papal suzerainty. Though the great princes were apt to remain aloof, western knights responded readily to the appeal of the holy war. Their motives were in part genuinely religious. They were ashamed to continue fighting among themselves; they wanted to fight for the Cross. But there was also a land-hunger to incite them, particularly in northern France, where the practice of primogeniture was being established. As a lord grew unwilling to divide his property and its offices, now beginning to be concentrated around a stone-built castle, his younger sons had to seek their fortunes elsewhere. There was a general restlessness and taste for adventure in the knightly class in France, most marked among the Normans, who were only a few generations removed from nomadic freebooters. The opportunity for combining Christian duty with the acquisition of land in a southern climate was very attractive.81
The First Crusade, led by princes from Norman Sicily, Normandy proper, France and Burgundy, set off from Europe by sea and land in 1096. Overland parties marched with the goodwill of the Byzantine emperor through the Balkans and then fought their way across the Seljuk Turks’ lands in Asia Minor to reach Syria in 1098, where they were joined by seafaring contingents from England, Italy and Flanders. They were delayed by the length of the siege they laid to Antioch, a key place on the coastal route through Syria, but by 1099 reached the Holy Land, and on 15 July, after a whirlwind assault on the city walls, took Jerusalem. It now became the capital of a Latin kingdom under a Burgundian duke who assumed the title of King of Jerusalem; other Crusading leaders set up states along the Syrian coast and in southern Asia Minor. These Crusading kingdoms endured, with varying fortunes, until 1291, when the last of them was swept away in the Mamelukes’ final counter-offensive. Western Christendom regularly revived and restored the Latin states by launching new Crusades, for which a remarkable enthusiasm persisted in France and the Holy Roman empire, but their success was one of diminishing returns as Muslims gathered forces to recover what for them also were holy places and to expel the invaders from the vital land bridge that connected Egypt and Baghdad.
The Islamic counter-offensive may have been essentially a response to a ‘frontier problem’, akin to that which troubled Islam on the border with the steppe. But the wars against the Christians achieved an intensity that the Muslims did not experience on any other front; moreover, a lamentable effect of the Fourth Crusade
(1198–1204) was that it inflicted irreparable damage on Byzantium: an ill-judged intervention in a succession conflict fatally weakened the eastern empire’s capacity to resist the advance of the Islamic Turks into southern Europe; the fall of Constantinople 250 years later was a delayed result of the depradations of the Fourth Crusaders.
Militarily, the Crusades provide us with the most accurate picture we possess of both the culture and the nature of European warfare in the long interregnum between the disappearance of the disciplined armies of Rome and the reappearance of state forces in the sixteenth century. Crusading warfare was a strange contest, which confronted the face-to-face warriors of the north European tradition with the evasive, harrying tactics of the steppe horsemen. It did not begin exactly like that. The Egyptian caliphate, before its usurpation by the Mamelukes, depended largely on Arab and Berber light cavalry, who fought with lance and sword rather than the composite bow and therefore competed on unequal terms with armoured Crusaders. At Ascalon in 1099, for example, Godfrey, the future king of Jerusalem, scattered such an army to the winds. But with the coming of Saladin from the Baghdad caliphate in 1174, and particularly after Baybar’s establishment of Mameluke power in Egypt in 1260, it was the steppe swarm against which the Crusaders had to launch that once-for-all-charge on which their ability to win battles depended and, fighting always at an inferiority of numbers, the balance of advantage moved progressively against them.