Finally, race, class, and status themselves were secondary to faith. The slave, the poor, and both the darker- and the lighter-skinned foreigner were all welcomed into the army of Muhammad—once they professed fealty to Islam. Abd ar-Rahman’s army that swept into Poitiers was probably composed mostly of Berber converts, supervised by Syrian Arabs, and replete with conquered and converted Spanish Visigoths and Jews. The Arabs were a relatively small tribe, so the mechanics of pacification and control of their newly acquired Islamic domains was impossible without the active participation of conquered peoples themselves.
The contrasts between the lightning-quick rise of Islam and the gradual spread of Christianity are often glossed over, but nevertheless striking. As Edward Gibbon most famously argued, in strictly military terms the thousand-year rise of Christianity after the fall of the Western Roman Empire (500–1500) had weakened Western armies. European military atrophy came not merely from evolving religious schisms and dynastic rivalries, or even from the loss of a uniform Latin language and Roman culture, but in part from the very nature of Christian dogma.
The worship of the rather mystical Jesus, who was not a man of this world—not a soldier, trader, or politician—the message of the Sermon on the Mount, and the call to “render unto Caesar what was Caesar’s” would for a time turn out to be poor incentives for achieving European political unity, religious orthodoxy, and military power. The pacifist traditions of Christianity in the short term stood in stark contrast to Islam, which in theory professed that Muslims should not fight fellow believers, but kill all others until “there is no god but Allah.” As late as the twelfth century, church fathers attempted to deny a proper Christian burial to any knight who had been killed in a joust or tournament; their aim was not merely to save Europeans for the struggle against Islam but also to curb the bloody and barbaric spectacle from the daily experience of Christian society. Turning the other cheek, repugnance for bloody combat, and preparing for the next world in the present one were antithetical to most traditional classical notions of civic militarism, patriotism, and the zeal for martial recognition from the state. The message of the New Testament was much different from the Iliad, Aeneid—or Koran.
The army of the Arabs was never designed to engage in a systematic collision of heavy infantry, followed by possession of territory and the installation of permanent garrisons, in the manner of Western imperialism of Macedonian, Roman, and Byzantine militaries. The Islamic army—itself largely mounted—counted on swiftness, mobility, and terror, with the assurance that ideology rather than ramparts would ensure lasting victories. Mounted sorties and ambushes, not decisive battle between phalanxes of heavy infantry, marked the Muslim way of war:
The make-up of Islamic armies was very different from those of the West. Horsemen of all kinds were predominant and infantry played a limited role. . . . There was much reliance on ambush, partly because this was an obvious tactic for light cavalry. But the really great contrast between East and West was in the approach to battle. Everywhere, close-quarter confrontation was decisive and the Western tradition was to bring that about as quickly as possible. In the East, light cavalry could outflank and unhinge formations by rapid movements. (J. France, Western Warfare in the Age of the Crusades, 212–13)
As long as the Arabs faced either dying empires like the Sassanids or the tribal Visigoths in northern Africa and Spain, success was guaranteed. None of those powers could provide large enough numbers of heavily armed infantrymen to bring the Muslims to close quarters; after the disastrous battle of Manzikert (1071), even the Byzantines were to learn that they no longer had the manpower or the logistical support to defeat Islam in Asia.
The breakneck spread of Islam was astounding. By 634, a mere two years after Muhammad’s death, Muslim armies were well engaged in the conquest of Persia. Syria fell in 636; Jerusalem was captured in 638. Alexandria was stormed in 641, opening the entire Visigothic realm to the west. Forty years later Muslims were at the gates of Constantinople itself, and from 673 to 677 nearly succeeded in capturing the city. By 681 the Arabs neared the Atlantic, formalizing Islam’s incorporation of the old kingdoms of the Berbers. Carthage was taken for good in 698 and their last queen, Kahina, captured, her head sent to the caliph at Damascus. Only seventeen miles now separated Islam from Europe proper. By 715 the Visigoths had been conquered in Spain, and periodic forays into southern France were commonplace. In 718 Arabs had crossed the Pyrenees in large numbers and occupied Narbonne, killing all the adult male inhabitants and selling the women and children into slavery. By 720 they were freely raiding in Aquitane. The large expedition of 732, led by Abd ar-Rahman, the governor of Moorish Spain, had already captured Poitiers and was advancing to sack Tours when it was intercepted by Charles Martel between the villages of Vieux-Poitiers and Moussais-la-Bataille on the road to Orléans.
For the rest of the ninth through the tenth centuries, the war between East and West would break out in northern Spain, southern Italy, Sicily, and the other larger islands of the Mediterranean, as the old mare nostrum of the Roman Empire became the new line of battle between two entirely antithetical cultures. The presence of Muslim ships on the Mediterranean and near constant wars with the Byzantines in the Adriatic and Aegean meant that western and eastern Europe were to be permanently separated. The idea of a unification of the old empire was abandoned for good, leaving a growing rivalry in Europe between a monolithic, imperial, and Orthodox Christian East and the fragmented and warring states of the Roman Catholic West.
Yet war by horsemen had only so many advantages. Mounted armies were difficult to transport by sea; they required enormous amounts of forage and grazing land and were hard to bring over mountain passes in great numbers. When Muslims reached the valleys of Spain and eastern Europe, the landscape was not that of the steppes or desert, and so did not favor large sweeps of flanking cavalry. In addition, Middle Eastern forces were never numerous enough to create the foundations of a national army; instead, they would become dependent on slave soldiers— Mameluks in the Middle East and later Janissaries among the Ottomans. Once the Islamic tide lapped on the shore of western Europe and the Byzantine Empire, its advance began to be halted. A static line of defense was established, as civilization in the West—in Spain, the Balkans, and the eastern Mediterranean—slowly returned to the offensive with infantry of mostly freemen.
DARK AGES?
With the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the latter fifth century A.D. the rule of empire vanished in northern Europe, and with it for a time an integrated market economy in the Mediterranean, North Africa, and Asia. The absence of the legions to provide security in the countryside against brigands and invaders at first led to ever greater disruption of farmland, while massive fortifications, not the courage of soldiers in open battle, were seen as the more reliable defense of the cities. The lack of central taxation meant that aqueducts, terraces, bridges, and irrigation canals were not properly maintained and often abandoned, leading not merely to the loss of potable water in the cities but also to a decline in agricultural productivity as valleys silted up and terraced land eroded.
The erosion of central imperial government and the collapse of urban culture also meant an end to large standing armies. Italy, Spain, Gaul, and Britain, in the absence of authority from Rome, were convulsed by a series of invasions and migrations by Vandals, Goths, Lombards, Huns, Franks, and Germans. Yet the victorious newcomers by the sixth and seventh centuries were no longer nomadic, but often had settled permanently in Roman territory, gradually converted to Christianity, learned some Latin, and carved out petty kingdoms guided loosely by the old Roman bureaucratic and legal tradition. If the new armies of western Europe were tiny and fragmented in comparison to Rome and often ensconced in fortified castles and towns, they nonetheless continued to rely on levies of heavy infantrymen fighting in columns, not tribal swarming, when it became necessary to engage in decisive battles.
The final collapse of Rome also brought a populat
ion decline in western Europe; and economic activity was lethargic for much of the so-called Dark Ages between 500 and 800. Christianity began to encroach on public and private lands, requiring enormous acreages to support monasteries, churches, and nunneries, whose clergy in the strict economic sense were not especially productive. If the estates of the old Roman patricians were sometimes unwisely expropriated for horse raising by the aristocracy of Franks and Lombards, then similarly the church also used the harvests from scarce and precious farmland to support a vast bureaucracy and an ambitious building program. By the end of the fifth century A.D., no single kingdom from Lombard Italy to Visigoth Spain could muster an army the size of the Roman force that had been annihilated at Cannae seven hundred years earlier.
Yet the fall of Rome often spread, rather than destroyed outright, classical civilization, as the fragments of empire slowly recovered and kept alive the cultural core of the old West. Writing continued. Even literature and scientific investigation were never completely lost. Latin remained the universal script of government, religion, and law from Italy to the North Sea. The Dark Ages (the term originally referred to the dearth of written knowledge that survived about the era) were characterized not so much by the chaos of an empire fallen as by the new diffusion of much of classical culture—language, architecture, military practices, religion, and economic expertise—into northern Europe, especially Germany, France, England, Ireland, and Scandinavia.
Islam had spread in the south and east by the creation of an entirely new theocratic state; in contrast, the remnants of classical culture, fused with Christianity, advanced throughout western and northern Europe due to the collapse of the Roman Empire. “Despite the resulting turmoil and destruction,” Henry Pirenne pointed out in regard to the supposed end of Roman civilization in northern Europe during the fifth century A.D., “no new principles made their appearance either in the economic or social order, nor in the linguistic situation, nor in the existing institutions. What civilization survived was Mediterranean” (Mohammed and Charlemagne, 284).
The sixth and seventh centuries actually saw improvements. Throughout the latter decades of the Roman Empire, there had been a gradual displacement of agrarians, concentrations of huge amounts of wealth, and constant class strife in the cities. The continuance of classical culture in ancient Gaul in the sixth through eight centuries, even under radically different and troubled material conditions, often meant that local government was more responsive to rural problems than had been Rome in its last two centuries. Under the Merovingians and Carolingians there nowhere reappeared the vast numbers of slaves that had characterized Roman civilization (by the fourth century A.D. in certain parts of the empire nearly a quarter of the population had been servile). Though Roman wealth and nationhood were gone for a time from the West, the deadly military tradition of classical antiquity was nevertheless kept alive. Most of the great military discoveries in both weaponry and tactics to come in the next millennium would originate in Europe—the continuing dividends of the Western approach to the dissemination of empirical data, the scientific method, and free inquiry.
“Greek fire” emerged at Byzantium somewhere around 675. Although the exact ingredients and their ratios of mixture remain unknown to this day, the torrent of flame that was shot out of Byzantine galleys was apparently a potent fusion of naphtha, sulfur, petroleum, and quicklime that could not be extinguished by water—a nearly unquenchable toxic spume that could incinerate enemy ships in seconds. Equally ingenious as the chemistry of Greek fire was its method of delivery, which involved a keen knowledge of pumps, pressurization, and mechanical engineering. A sealed container was heated from below with fuel and bellows and injected with forced air from a pump. Then the compressed mixture was forced out another outlet into a long bronze tube. The jellied mass was ignited at the end of the barrel, resulting in a sea of continuous flame spurting out from this ancient flamethrower. Ships with such fiery contraptions allowed the small Byzantine navy mastery of the eastern Mediterranean and saved Constantinople itself on occasion—none more dramatic than Leo III’s incineration of the Islamic armada of the caliph Sulaymān in 717 in waters surrounding the capital.
Controversy surrounds the exact origins of the stirrup—it may have been originally of Asian design—but by A.D. 1000 most Western cavalrymen were employing new saddles equipped with stirrups, even if they learned of their use via the Arabs, who had copied the original designs either from the Byzantines or by trading with the Orient in the early seventh century. Under the western European kingdoms, the stirrup was envisioned not merely as an aid to horse mastery but as integral to the emergence of a new lance-bearing knight, who could for the first time absorb the shock of spearing a fixed target on the gallop without being thrown from his mount. While such lancers could never break true infantry, small corps could easily ride down isolated groups of foot soldiers during both attack and retreat. The stirrup meant not that western European militaries were dominated by heavy lancers, but that their mostly infantry armies, at key moments in the battle—when gaps appeared in enemy lines or during the rout—could send out small corps of deadly horsemen to slaughter with impunity light infantrymen and poorly organized foot soldiers.
The crossbow—in use throughout Europe by 850—was a smaller-sized derivative of the classical “belly-bow,” through substitution of a handheld crank for large torsion cables and sprockets. Scholars cite the crossbow’s deficiencies in comparison with either the later English long-bow or the Eastern composite bow, both of which had greater range and rates of fire. The crossbow, however, required far less training to use than either, did not tire the archer to the same degree as hand-pulled bows, and its smaller all-metal bolts had greater penetrating power at short ranges. Crossbow bolts alone were able to slice through the heavy chain mail of the knight, and meant that a relatively poor man without much training could kill both an aristocratic horseman and his armored mount in seconds for the cost of a tiny metal projectile. Consequently, the church often issued edicts against its use—a doomed prospect of technological repression with no heritage in the West—and finally retreated to the position that crossbows should be outlawed in all intramural wars between Christians.
Siege engines underwent constant improvement. After 1180, vast catapults were powered by counterbalances rather than torsion alone. Such trebuchets often had ten-ton counterweights and could throw stones of three hundred pounds well over one hundred yards, exceeding the delivery weight of the old Roman traction catapults fivefold, while maintaining nearly the same range. In turn, fortifications were built entirely of stone and to heights unimagined by classical engineers, replete with intricate towers, crenellations, and interior keeps. It was not merely that European castles and walls were larger and stouter than those in Africa and the Near East, they were more numerous as well, due to improvements in the cutting, transportation, and lifting of stone. Plate armor, common by 1250, was also a European specialty, ensuring that most European knights and infantrymen were far better protected than their Islamic opponents. When gunpowder was introduced from the Chinese in the fourteenth century, Europe alone was able to craft dependable and heavy cannon—Constantinople fell in 1453 through the efforts of Western-fabricated artillery—and handheld matchlock weapons in any great number. So, too, fully rigged, multisailed ships were common in European waters by 1430, and were superior to any vessels in either the Ottoman or the Chinese navies.
Key to this continuing Western ability to craft good weapons, along with fluid and innovative tactical doctrine, was the embrace of published military research, which married theory with field experience to offer pragmatic advice to commanders in the field. The late Roman handbooks of Frontinus, and to a greater extent Vegetius, were copied even throughout the Dark Ages and became a bible of sorts to many western European warlords. Rabanus Maurus, the ninth-century archbishop of Mainz, published an annotated De re militari specifically to improve Frankish warfare. For the next four hundred years, adaptations an
d translations of Vegetius appeared throughout Europe by Alfonso X (1252–84), Bono Gimaboni (1250), and Jean de Meung (1284).
European siegecraft itself was unmatched, precisely because it followed in the past tradition of classical poliorkētika (the arts of “polis enclosing”). Manuals such as the Mappae Clavicula instructed besiegers in the use of engines and incendiary devices. The emperors Maurice (Ars militaris) and Leo VI (Tactica) outlined Byzantine infantry and naval tactics in preparing manuals for their generals and admirals to keep the Mediterranean Sea and its harbors free from Arab fleets. In contrast, Islamic writing on war was rarely abstract or theoretical—or even practical—but more holistic and philosophical, and largely concerned itself with the proper rules and conduct of the jihad.
Among the early Franks this need to write about war and to publish manuals about its practice were in direct emulation of Roman and Greek thinkers. Military practice did not operate in a vacuum, but was closely connected to the presence of an educated elite familiar with classical ideas of military organization and weaponry. Under the Carolingians, a systematic approach was undertaken to the preservation of classical manuscripts, along with efforts to assure education in the Greco-Roman tradition:
Though defined by religion, Europe was also a community of scholars who read and wrote the same Latin language and who rescued a great part of the legacy of antiquity from irretrievable loss. In the ninth and tenth centuries, schoolmasters devised a new curriculum of studies based in part on the classics that they had rediscovered. In doing so they laid the foundations of educational practices for centuries. (P. Riché, The Carolingians, 361)
Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power Page 20