Dueling—the mano a mano contest of equally paired opponents—was the gold standard of knightly combat, and considered a direct contact with the perceived nobility of the ancient Greek and Roman tradition. It was the honor paid to an opponent in recognition of a shared culture and social status. Even if the honor ended in death, the combatants were brothers under the skin. The image of the knight riding directly against another knight, the couched lances splintering against or piercing the plate armor of the enemy, is the image most evocatively associated with medieval warfare—but inevitably, it is not the whole story. There was a jarring collision between the rhetoric and the reality. That is not to say that dueling was not a cherished ideal among the knightly class, but only to recognize that sometimes the ideal ended up in the mire of the battlefield.
Our focus on the chivalric as the defining characteristic of medieval warfare reflects a desire, as true now as it was for the balladeers, saga poets, and chroniclers of the Middle Ages, to romanticize the awful truth that the battlefield had more to do with the bloody chaos of a mêlée than with the noble symmetry of the duel. The knight stood as much chance of dying in the bloody scrum of battle (for very often he fought on foot), where he could be stabbed by a peasant-soldier sticking a dagger into an armpit or crotch, or up the unprotected rear end, or ramming it through the slit of a helmet visor, as he did of facing off with his peer. Once unhorsed, by design or accident, he might literally be hammered to death, as was the fate of many French knights at Crécy and Agincourt who fell to the mauls (mallets used to drive in the sharpened stakes that protected the English archers against frontal cavalry assault) of “base villeins.”
Agile and skilled infantrymen developed techniques for dealing with mounted knights. Almogavars, for example, were rugged warriors from the mountainous regions of Aragon and Catalonia who wore no armor and fought with javelin and short stabbing sword. They were used extensively as mercenaries in Italy and Greece. One, who was captured by a Crusader army in thirteenth-century Greece, was pitted against a fully armed and armored mounted Angevin knight as an entertainment for his captors,5 the assumption being that the knight would easily overwhelm so lightly equipped an opponent: “The almogavar awaited the knight’s charge, then at the last moment hurled his javelin—the azcona—into his opponent’s horse, dodged the latter’s lance then jumped on the unfortunate knight as he fell from his wounded horse and held a knife to his throat. At this point the duel was stopped.”6 Armed with a colltell, a cross between a knife and a butcher’s cleaver, an Almogavar foot soldier could do very serious damage to a knight, armored as he might be. A contemporary source records that at the battle of Kephissos in 1311 the Spanish light infantrymen ran in among the heavily armored Frankish knights of the Duke of Athens and massacred them. One “gave such a cut that the greave with the leg came off in one piece and besides it entered half a palm into the horse’s flank.”7
Our fascination with the mounted knight has somewhat distorted his importance in medieval battle. Not only did infantry play an important part, but an argument can be made that they were, in fact, the predominant element. During the main span of the medieval period (from around AD 500 to about 1400, when guns first made themselves felt on the battlefield), infantry outnumbered cavalry “by at least five to one.”8 Infantry was a cost-effective option compared with cavalry, and tactics, essentially through the mixed use of pikemen and missile firers (at first crossbowmen and archers, who were eventually superseded by arquebusiers and musketeers), developed to maximize the use of foot soldiers. For example, at the battle of Courtrai (in modern Belgium) in 1302, Flemish pikemen warded off French knights by firmly planting the butts of their pikes in the ground in order to present a porcupine hedge of points. They were supported by crossbowmen, and any knights who might have penetrated the hedge were dealt with unceremoniously by soldiers armed with goedendags—the Flemish version of the “morningstar”—the crude but effective spiked mace. And at Courtrai the Flemish knights, led by Guy de Namur and Wilhelm van Jülich and their entourages, fought on foot in support of the lowly infantry and crossbowmen. In fact, fighting on foot was almost the preferred style for knights in many battles of the era. The result was a devastating defeat for the French knights who were dragged down from their mounts when the horses were hit by crossbow quarrels or disemboweled on the Flemings’ pikes, to be unceremoniously put to death.9
If the knights and men-at-arms killed lowly enemies with impunity, it is not surprising that, given half a chance, the base villeins would take their revenge. In 1332 at Dupplin Moor in Scotland an English army, under the capable military leadership of Sir Henry Beaumont, employed tactics that would later be put to effective use in France during some of the great battles of the Hundred Years’ War. The English absorbed the spirited mounted frontal attack of the Scots chivalry led by Donald, Earl of Mar, and Lord Robert Bruce (the illegitimate son of the late king, the great Robert Bruce). While battling with the English foot, the Scottish knights were compressed into a suffocatingly (often literally) small killing ground by the combined pressure of their own disorganized infantry barging into their rear and the enveloping folds of the English archery wings determinedly pressing in on their flanks. According to the Lanercost Chronicle, “Each crushed his neighbour, and for every one fallen there fell a second, and then a third,” until the pile of bodies reached the height of a spear.10 The English infantry and archers surrounded the heap of wounded, dying, and dead Scots, many of them suffocated, to kill the survivors. Mar and Bruce died this way, along with perhaps as many as 58 other knights, 1,200 men-at-arms, and hundreds, perhaps thousands, of foot soldiers. The English lost only 2 knights and 33 soldiers.11
At Crécy in 1346, the historian Jean Froissart records a similar tale of mounted knights and men-at-arms hurling themselves in disorderly passion against the English archers who, having created havoc in the small killing zone of the French knightly vanguard, enabled the lowly English foot soldiers to move in for the kill. “In the English army there were some Cornish and Welsh men on foot, who had armed themselves with large knives, these advancing through the ranks of the [English] men-at-arms and archers, who made way for them, came upon the French when they were in this danger, and falling upon earls, barons, knights, and squires, slew many, at which the king of England was exasperated.”12 Edward III’s exasperation was probably due to the abrogation of the chivalric code. Knights were meant to kill knights; underlings were not. It was not only a breach of battlefield decorum but also a threatening rupture of the social order.
Tactically, the story that unfolded at Agincourt in 1415 would be much the same. A French knight, Jehan de Wavrin, described the bloody debacle:
Their horses stumbled among the stakes [of the English longbowmen], and they were speedily slain by the archers, which was a great pity. And most of the rest, through fear, gave way and fell back into their vanguard, to whom they were a great hindrance; and they opened their ranks in several places, and made them fall back and lose their footing in some land newly sown, for their horses had been so wounded by the arrows that the men could no longer manage them. Thus … the vanguard of the French was thrown into disorder, and men-at-arms without number began to fall.… Soon afterwards the English archers, seeing the vanguard thus shaken, issued from behind their stockade, threw away their bows and quivers, then took their swords, hatchets, mallets, axes, falcon-beaks [macelike weapons] and other weapons, and, pushing into the places where they saw these breaches, struck down and killed these Frenchmen without mercy, and never ceased to kill till the said vanguard which had fought little or not at all was completely overwhelmed.13
Many suffocated or were crushed to death, including the rotund Duke of York, whose body, along with that of the Earl of Oxford, Wavrin records, was “boiled, in order to separate the bones and carry them to England” and a decent Christian funeral. Many of the French knights and men-at-arms who escaped the crushing mêlée only to be captured were ordered put to death by Henry V,
fearful of a reported French cavalry column that could have linked up with the prisoners. At first the English captors refused Henry’s order, no doubt as much deeply angered at the loss of potential ransom as they were offended by a similar breach of the chivalric code that had appalled Edward III at Crécy. But Henry overrode their objections and sent in two hundred of his archers, who “fell on the French, paunching them [as in gutting game] and stabbing them in the face.” The cavalry column never materialized, and as a chaplain reported, “We returned victorious through the heaps and piles of the slain.” Henry ordered the great hymns of thanksgiving, the Te Deum and Non Nobis, to be sung: “O Lord, let thy mercy lighten upon us, as our trust is in thee.”
THE WEAPONS OF medieval warfare reflect the great social schism between noble and nonnoble warriors. Unlike the codes of their counterparts in the Islamic world or in the samurai class of medieval Japan, Western chivalry abhorred any kind of missile weaponry for knightly use. Of course, in a broader tactical sense archers and crossbowmen (and, later hand gunners) were an essential element of the battle array, no matter how despised by the noble commanders as an insult to the ideal of close combat. There may also have been another explanation: that combat with edged weapons and lances offered some control to the victorious knight over the outcome of the contest: “It allowed the warrior the opportunity to display magnanimity and it allowed him to supplement his income handsomely by holding his erstwhile opponents captive until they could be suitably ransomed.”14 Missile weapons, once launched, were blind to social class, and they could kill some valuable asset better kept alive. This may help explain the recurring theme of aristocratic outrage at crossbowmen and arquebusiers, who, if captured, were either killed on the spot or had a hand severed so that they would never ply their trade again. The death these underlings meted out was all too democratic. It was not good death. The medieval church would regularly pass down injunctions against missile weapons because they were “unfair” to the nobility.
Magnanimity toward a defeated foe of the same class was an expression of solidarity that went beyond temporary enmity. This was a world that was not yet locked into national identity (that would come with the centralization of power in the monarchy and then the state), and the brotherhood of chivalry transcended geographic boundaries. Profit was intimately bound up with chivalry. The knightly class had risen, through war, to social, economic, and political power. And it was an expensive operation to maintain. Plunder was a major incentive for all classes of warrior, with quite precise calculations on how much each participant would receive; only the style of plunder distinguished social classes, and then quite often not by much. For example, the Hundred Years’ War in France was an important profit center for nobleman and ordinary soldier alike. English knights objected “vociferously to any temporary outbreak of peace [and] the English troops’ lust for loot was such that special regulations had been introduced to stop men brawling over their prisoners. Not surprisingly, the king kept the most important captured castles, land and enemy personnel. Contracts and sub-contracts determined most of the rest. Usually the senior party took one-third, an ordinary soldier paying a third of his own ‘winnings’ to his officer, and so on up the chain of command.”15
Although the lowly foot soldier had little say in his fate, the knight to some extent chose his destiny, one that might well embrace death in battle. The code of honor that enveloped him and signified his superiority also, ironically, could propel him to his doom. The knight’s history is filled, as is his samurai counterpart’s, with acts of extraordinary bravery and of suicidal hubris. At Dupplin Moor the Earl of Mar, outraged by accusations of his treachery, claimed the right to redeem his reputation by being the first to charge into the English host, only to be upstaged by his companion in arms and honor, Lord Robert Bruce. Both were killed.
At Bannockburn (1314), a great Scots victory over the old enemy, the English Earl of Gloucester, a young man of twenty-two, stung by accusations that he had shown cowardice and incompetence, rode almost unarmored into a Scots schiltron to be speared to death. At Crécy, Charles, the blind king of Bohemia and an ally of the French, hearing that the battle was all but lost and that his son, in a funk, had quit the field, ordered his horse’s bridle to be linked with those of two attendants and to be led into the killing ground. The chronicler Froissart says that “they rode in among the enemy, and he and his companions were all slain, and on the morrow they were found on the ground with all their horses tied together.”
In all cultures where social and economic leadership is intimately tied to personal prowess on the battlefield, such sacrifices are mandated. During the Gempei War (1180–85) between the two great samurai clans the Taira and Minamoto, one of the Minamoto nobles, Yorimasa, with his two sons and a small group of warriors, elected to hold out against a powerful Taira force in order to gain time for the main Minamoto army to make its escape. Both the sons were killed defending their aged father, who, however, managed to commit hara-kiri in such impressive style that it became the enduring model of the way a defeated samurai should quit the world. First he wrote his death poem and then opened his stomach with one great horizontal dagger cut to release his samurai spirit, while a retainer decapitated him and threw his weighted head into the river so as to keep it from enemy trophy hunters.16
Honor might also demand that a noble warrior sacrifice himself if his leader was slain. In 1183 the Minamoto leader, Yoshinaka, was attempting to escape from battle when he was hit in the face by a Taira arrow and then decapitated. His retainer, Imai Kanehira, saw this and cried out: “Alas, for whom now have I to fight? See, you men of the East Country. I will show you how the mightiest champion in Japan can end his life!” Putting the point of his sword in his mouth, he flung himself headlong from his horse to be impaled. The codes of honor that governed both samurai and knight are similarly death-centered. Life is impermanent, its outcome determined by God or fate. To die in combat was to reaffirm that connection and to underwrite the currency of their class.
Weaponry was also a social signifier, loaded with meaning beyond its purely military function and imbued with magical, fetishistic attributes. The Vikings “ennobled” their weapons with poetical epithets: Spears were referred to as “flying dragons of the wounds,” axes as “witches of the helmet,” arrows as “ice of the bow.”17 Swords were particularly magical, and in the Viking sagas their names alone could spell death. Thorstein Vikingsson’s sword was the legendary Angrvadil, which his father had taken from the slain Björn Blue-tooth. Its reputation went before it: “When Vikingsson drew it, it was as if lightning flashed from it. Harek, seeing this said ‘I should never have fought against thee, I had known thou hadst Angrvadil … it was the greatest misfortune when Angrvadil went out of our family’; and at that moment Vikingsson struck down on the head of Harek, and cleft him in two from head to feet, so that the sword entered the ground up to the hilt.”18 The church established a liturgy around AD 950 to bless swords and, at a slightly later date, created a ceremony to bless those who would use them: “Almighty father, who has permitted the use of the sword to repress the malice of the wicked and defend justice … cause Thy servant here before Thee never to use this sword … to injure anyone unjustly, but always to defend the just and the right.”19
Weapons and armor of the nobler class were often decorated in ways that we might think irrational and not germane to their purpose. They could be astonishingly beautiful, and we may find it bizarre or disturbing that things of such decorative intricacy were dedicated to killing and maiming. Other weapons, however, those of the rank-and-file infantry, were emphatically not beautiful at all. The bills, axes, and maces had a lethal functionality not too far removed from the implements of farm and abattoir from which they originated. The pole weapons burgeoned into a whole family of specialized implements with exotic-sounding names—guisarme, voulge, halberd, fauchard, glaive, partizan (known in Bohemia as the “ear-spoon”), ravensbill, Rossschinder (“horse killer”). There wer
e hundreds of variations for each type, reflecting local taste, but the essence was an ax head mounted on a staff (the “pole”), often with numerous hooks and spikes for pulling mounted enemies from their horses (the Mongols of the fourteenth century were particularly adept at unhorsing Christian knights with hooked spears).20 The point provided a thrusting element; the ax head, a formidable slashing and cleaving element. They were the Swiss Army knife of the medieval infantryman and in the hands of trained soldiers could inflict terrible wounds.
At Morgarten in 1315, one of the bloodiest battles of the medieval period, the Swiss infantry, “slashing and striking with their terrible halberds, shearing through helms,” killed half of the knights of Duke Leopold of Austria’s invading force. Excavated skeletons of knights killed by a halberd show that their skulls were cleft down to the teeth.21 The Ahlspiess, a pike with a long square-sectioned blade, was specifically designed to penetrate the joints of a knight’s armor. The point of the halberd could do quite terrible damage to a knight who had been thrown off balance. If he was “struck on the back of his head, or between his shoulders, he would fall forward, exposing the unarmored back of his thighs and backside to the halberdier.”22
The upthrust from an infantryman armed with pike or bill or halberd was a serious threat to the mounted knight in two other ways: The belly of his horse was susceptible to a ripping thrust, and the knight’s throat and under-jaw were targets for a piercing upjab. The horse could not be completely encased in armor and be expected to carry a man who, in armor, might easily weigh in excess of 250 pounds. The beast would always be vulnerable to a gutting thrust up through the unprotected belly. In fact the horse, it could be argued, although the defining piece of knightly gear (the word chivalry comes from the French for horse, cheval), was one of the most vulnerable parts of the knight’s equipage.
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