During the 1500s the knight developed, in response to the vulnerability to his throat, an haute-piece—an armored collar that extended from his shoulder. His counterpart in Japan, the mounted samurai, faced exactly the same threat and added a throat protector (nodowa). Nevertheless, it was not foolproof protection, as the fourteenth-century historical epic the Taiheiki illustrates when an infantryman (in this case a ohei or monk-warrior) wielding the halberdlike naginata (about 12 feet long) attacks a mounted samurai:
Just then a monk kicked over the shield in front of him and sprang forward, whirling his naginata like a water wheel. It was Kajitsu of Harima. Kaito [a mounted samurai] received him with his right arm, meaning to cut down into his helmet bowl, but the glancing sword struck down lightly from Kajitsu’s shoulder-plate.… Again Kaito struck forcefully, but his left foot broke through its stirrup, and he was likely to fall from his horse. As he straightened his body, Kajitsu thrust up his naginata, and two or three times drove its point quickly into his helmet. Kaito fell off his horse, pierced cleanly through the throat. Swiftly Kajitsu put down his foot on Kaito’s armor, seized his side hair, and cut off his head, that he might fix it to his naginata.23
Every threat had to be countered with a defense until, by the end of the medieval era, the knight, once lightly armored in mail hauberk, helmet, and shield, was transformed into a machine of beautiful and all-encasing steel; and although a basic suit of field armor might weigh in the region of 50 pounds, superb craftsmanship gave the knight a surprisingly high degree of maneuverability (it is said that he could vault onto his horse, for example).24 However, as late as the 1640s, Edmund Ludlow, a royalist cuirassier in the English Civil War, noted that when unhorsed, he “could not without great difficulty recover on horse back again, being loaded with cuirassier arms,” and Sir Edmund Verney flatly refused to go into battle heavily armored, “for it will kill a man to serve in a whole cuirass. I am resolved to use nothing but back, breast, and gauntlet; if I had a Pott [helmet] for the Head that were Pistoll-proofe it maye bee I would use it if it were light.”25 And he was to pay dearly for his determination, being cut down at the battle of Edgehill in 1642, disdaining even a leather buff coat for protection. On the other hand, the royalist Earl of Northampton was so completely armored that his enemies had to take off his helmet in order to kill him.26
A knight fighting dismounted, which was common, would have tired easily (the buildup of heat within the suit alone must have been a serious problem), and if struggling on muddy or uneven terrain, he would have put himself at great risk. In comparison, his counterpart in feudal Japan took a very different tack. Where Europeans emphasized size and weight, the samurai opted for lightness and mobility. It is as though the European knight himself became a weapon, dedicated to shock impact. The samurai, on the other hand, considered excessive protection counterproductive.27 He carried no shield because his katana (main sword) was invariably used two-handed, which precluded using a shield in the European style. The weapon dictated a straight-on style of fighting: He stood squarely before his opponent in, for him, a heroically direct confrontation. The type of weapon, the way it was to be used, and the chivalric code that dictated that use all came together. The samurai, however, unlike the knight, saw no disgrace in using standoff weaponry such as the bow. A principal weapon, though, was the naginata, used both mounted and on foot. Some evidence suggests that when engaged against a similarly armed mounted samurai it was wielded rather like the knight’s lance during the tourney, that is, couched under the right arm and angled across the horse’s neck, but more often it would be employed as a slashing weapon with the mounted warrior standing in the stirrups.28
Although the poleax and the war hammer were often favored by knights, the sword was the trademark weapon of the noble warrior. The swords of the early medieval period were ancestors of the Roman spatha, a parallel-edged slashing sword that, with the spread of plate armor in the mid-thirteenth century, developed into a more pointed weapon, adapted as much to thrusting (for penetrating chain mail or piercing the joints of plate armor) as cutting. Even if armor were not pierced (and some modern tests suggest that piercing mail armor with a sword thrust is problematic), a blow from a heavy blade could cause bone fractures and internal injuries.29 A mounted knight might have a large “war” sword weighing about 5 pounds hung from the front of the saddle, while in his sword belt he would carry a smaller, “arming” sword, weighing about 3 pounds.30
The transition to plate armor during the thirteenth century was not only a defensive response to pikes but also an attempt to counter the lethality of the very class of weapon the knight held in contempt: the bow and crossbow. Crossbows are known to have been used by Chinese infantry in the fourth century BCE and were used as hunting weapons by the Romans. Their reemergence in Europe during the tenth century seems to have been linked to an upsurge in siege warfare (the Roman siege ballista were essentially huge crossbows), but the Normans took to the crossbow with enthusiasm as an infantry weapon. The advantages to the user were enormous. A knight in whom years of training and a huge amount of money had been invested could be killed by a dolt with a bolt at about 200 yards or less.
The crossbow is a forerunner of machinelike weapons such as the rifle in that although it was relatively easy to use it was of fairly complex construction, and like all machines, it had its own specialized vocabulary. The bowlike crosspiece (“span” or “lathe”), made of a hardwood such as yew, oak, or maple (though in the Islamic world it might have been made of an amalgam of horn, sinew, and wood), was lashed with whipcord to a stock (“tiller”). The bowstring (“bridle”) was made of whipcord or sinew. To “span” the bow (prepare it for firing), the operator put his foot into the stirrup at the bow end of the tiller and drew back the bridle with muscle power—a hook attached to the crossbowman’s belt and snagged under the bridle pulled it back when the crossbowman straightened up. It might also be pulled back with the aid of a mechanical crank. Once pulled back, the bridle was secured by a catch made of horn. Dartlike bolts (“quarrels”), made most commonly of yew, ash, witch hazel, or poplar and tipped with wicked little heads of a variety of designs depending on the grief they were meant to inflict, were placed in a groove running down the top face of the tiller, engaging with the bridle by a notch (“knock”) at the rear of the bolt. A triggerlike mechanism released the catch, and off flew the bolt—not fired, but “cast,” as though its victim was an unsuspecting fish.
The power of the crossbow, in one way, was considerably more than the longbow’s. It could “draw” about 750 pounds, compared with the longbow’s 70–150 pounds, but its released energy was comparatively inefficient because the span was short and its tips, whose whiplash movement turned stored energy into bolt speed and range, moved through a much shorter trajectory than the long and powerful expanse of the longbow’s. Also, the longbow’s arrow was heavier than a quarrel, which gave it greater penetrative power over a greater distance. To match the longbow’s lethality, the crossbow would have had to be considerably larger, which would have made it impossibly unwieldy. Even in its comparatively light form it already suffered from a lengthy loading procedure that left the crossbowman vulnerable.
These characteristics molded the tactical use of both types of bow. The crossbow tended to be deployed in relatively close action where the flat trajectory would have a potentially devastating effect (the problem was, of course, that the closer the crossbowman was to the action, the greater his chances of being ridden down or shot down during the relatively lengthy periods of reloading). The longbow, on the other hand, tended to be used at longer distance in arcing trajectories where its high speed of reloading (about twelve shafts per minute, compared with perhaps three per minute for the crossbow—about the same rate as a black-powder musket) could inflict a storm of harm on the enemy.
The famous confrontation between the Genoese mercenary crossbowmen fighting for France and the English and Welsh longbowmen at the battle of Crécy in 1346 is a good illu
stration. The Genoese were the first to advance within range but without the large shields (pavise) behind which they could shelter while reloading. In addition the French approach had been chaotic, and the chronicler Jean Froissart writes that “there fell a great rain,” which almost certainly slackened the crossbow bridles. In contrast, the longbowmen unstrung their bows during the drenching downpour and coiled the linen strings under their helmets for protection. The Genoese got off the first volley and would almost certainly have had to retighten the strings of their crossbows, which increased their risk of being counterattacked. At this point the three thousand or so longbowmen
knocked [fitted the arrows to the string] and drew, closing their backs, opening their chests, pushing into their bows, anchoring for a second, holding their drawn arrows firm, thumbs of their drawing hands touching right ears or the points of jaws as they aimed for a heartbeat when the drawn shafts slid past their bow hands until the cold steel of the arrowheads touched the first knuckles; letting fly, right hands following the strings almost as swiftly as the shafts’ flight past the brown bows, grabbing the next arrow from ground, or belt, or quiver, to knock and draw and anchor and loose, in deadly unrelenting repetition.31
The hail of arrows—“so thick that it seemed like snow”—took a terrible toll, and the Genoese broke, many only to fall beneath the hooves of the advancing French knights who contemptuously rode down their own crossbowmen in a mad rush to get at the English.
The essential difference between the crossbow and the longbow had as much to do with relative cost as with relative lethality. A longbow, although mechanically simpler than the crossbow, was not necessarily cheaper. It was made from specialized wood, the supply of which presupposed land use dedicated to growing trees rather than more immediately profitable crops. The crossbow, even if made of wood, did not demand the exacting material of the longbow; in fact it could be, and was, made of a composite of materials. But perhaps more important, the crossbow also had a striking economic advantage that would be a preview of the age of the handgun: It did not take the great deal of training, practice, and physical strength to turn out a competent crossbowman that it took to turn out an archer. The long training of an archer was by far the most significant “below-the-line” cost of the bow. It would be the crossbow, unlovely and unloved, rather than the longbow, romantic and revered, that pointed the way to the future and the victory of technology over muscle.
THE CRUSADES WERE a clash not only of religious ideologies (a writhing bag of snakes would have been easier to deal with) but also of tactical ideologies. Christian and Muslim warriors had been shaped by different traditions. The mounted knight sought to bring the matter to the point of decision by a trial of personal arms at close quarters, and his supporting troops—infantry and crossbowmen—were just that: a support that set up the possibility of the decisive charge. Islamic warriors, whose tactical antecedents were from Asiatic raiders, were rarely committed to an all-out charge unless, due to prior softening up by missile weapons, the enemy appeared to be terminally vulnerable. The horse bowmen, like those Parthians who had destroyed the Roman legions at Carrhae in 53 BCE, were still one of the most important elements of Saracen combat. The horse was, of course, one important element that Christian and Muslim shared, but it was used in strikingly different ways. To put it schematically, the Muslim warrior used his horse as a weapons platform, whereas the knight used it as a weapon; the one stood off and fired his arrows, the other sought to make physical contact. An effective cavalry charge relied on a collective and concentrated weight to destroy the enemy. It demanded cohesion and discipline. The problem, however, was that as it got under way, the vagaries of terrain and the individual horse and rider caused it to destabilize and disintegrate, and many knights were killed in the ensuing counterattack, unable to get back to the shelter of the infantry (a similar problem faced by tanks many centuries later).
In the early phases of the Crusades, the Christians’ reliance on heavy cavalry cost them dearly. Using tactics not unlike those of the nineteenth-century Plains Indians, Saracen horse bowmen swept around the invading armies, shooting down men and mounts, only to melt away when the Christian cavalry sallied out to engage. If, however, the Saracens, in their initial missile phase, managed to uncover a weak spot, in went the heavier lance-armed cavalry, to be followed by infantry support.
The Itinerarium, a chronicle of Richard Lionheart’s Third Crusade, describes the frustration of the Crusaders before the battle of Arsuf in 1191 as the Muslim horsemen, “keeping alongside our army as it advanced, struggled to inflict what it could upon us, firing darts and arrows which flew very thickly, like rain. Alas! Many horses fell dead transfixed with missiles, many were gravely wounded and died much later! You would have seen such a great downpour of darts and arrows that where the army passed through you could not have found a space of four foot of ground without shafts stuck in it.”32 However, it says something about the relative lethality of the Asiatic bow compared with the longbow that many a Christian foot soldier managed to weather the storm. The Islamic chronicler Bahā-al-Din, Saladin’s secretary, describes the Christian foot, protected by their thick quilted jackets (gambesons) and mail shirts (hauberks): “I noted among them men who had from one to ten shafts sticking in their backs, yet trudged on at their ordinary pace and did not fall out of their ranks.… The Muslims sent in volleys of arrows from all sides, endeavoring to irritate the knights and to worry them into leaving their ramparts of infantry. But it was all in vain.”33
On the other side, Crusader crossbowmen were effective and feared. Protected by pikemen from the predations of Muslim light cavalry, they inflicted significant casualties. Although it was contrary to Muslim law, captured crossbowmen stood a good chance of being massacred.34 (Ironically, Richard himself would die from gangrene caused by a crossbow bolt wound in the shoulder at the siege of Châlus, a relatively insignificant little castle near Limoges, France, in 1199—and thus, “the Lion by the Ant was slain.”)
If the Muslims favored fluidity and opportunistic attack, the Europeans valued cohesion, organization, and discipline (not always so easily achieved when restraint was challenged by the hair trigger of chivalric hubris). The Christians had to prevent their opponents from breaking down their solidus inter se conglobati—meaning, in tactical terms, sticking together (literally, “coagulating”). Maintaining cohesion on the march was paramount, for when they allowed themselves to be “cut out” into smaller units—as they were, for example, at the battle of Hattin in 1187—the Christians were usually, and emphatically, done to death.35 To prevent this unhappy outcome, Crusader columns had to fashion themselves into forts-on-the-hoof; the cavalry sheltered within the protective walls of pikemen and crossbowmen, who worked in tandem to keep the Muslim horse at bay. Richard Lionheart, on the Third Crusade (1189–92), had his front rank of pikemen, each protected by his shield and shoulder-to-shoulder with his comrades, kneel, presenting his grounded pike toward the Saracen cavalry. Behind them were pairs of crossbowmen, one loading and the other firing.
Richard was also masterful at shepherding his flock as it slowly progressed along the coast of Palestine, the knights on the seaward side, protected by infantry and archers on the exposed landward flank. At Arsuf the Christian chivalry had a rare chance to break out and run down their attackers. Ironically, Richard I’s victory was to some extent due to a breakdown in the very discipline he had tried so hard to maintain. He was forced to support an unauthorized attack by the Knights Hospitallers and in the series of ensuing charges scattered and eventually destroyed Saladin’s army. For the Muslims, their deaths were also a result of either failing or being prevented from exercising their crucial tactical advantage: mobility. And once caught, they were enthusiastically dispatched. Contemporaries record that the field was bloodily strewn with seven thousand bodies.
GUNPOWDER WAS FIRST used in China, where the earliest written formula for it dates from 1044. It was then adopted by the Muslim world, where it was
known, poetically, as “Chinese snow.”36 The English-speaking world had an altogether more blunt-nosed word for it. Gun is first used in an English text in 1339, and a new era of battlefield lethality was born.37
THREE
A TERRIBLE THUNDER
Battlefield Lethality in the Black-Powder Era
Firearms are the most destructive category of weapons, and now more than ever. If you need convincing, just go to the hospital and you will see how few men have been wounded by cold steel as opposed to firearms. My argument is not advanced lightly. It is founded on knowledge.
—Maréchal de Puységur, Art de guerre par principes et par règles, 1749
IT IS IRONIC that the warfare of rationality—that is, a way of destroying warriors not with the crude slash and shove of muscle and steel but with the application of science and invention, of formulae and calculation—should have one foot in a pile of ordure. Warfare in the “Modern Age” is based on piss and shit.
One of the primary ingredients of gunpowder—saltpeter (potassium nitrate)—is a by-product of the bacterial decay of organic matter, particularly dung and urine. In the fourteenth century, gunpowder manufacturers in Europe were attempting to set themselves up as a self-sustaining industry independent of importation, not unlike our nervous dependence on foreign oil.1 Saltpeter “farms” were established in Europe, and by the 1420s it was half the price it had been only fifty years earlier. England was an important center because the English were renowned as redoubtable boozers (a reputation they seem to have enthusiastically sustained over the centuries) and therefore famously productive in the elimination of highly ammoniac urine. Bert S. Hall puts it in scientific language: “Urine from wine and beers is based on the fact that ammonia levels in the urine increase dramatically as the body metabolizes alcohol.… A heavy drinker’s urine contributes more vitally needed NH4 to the heap than does an abstemious person.”2 Saltpeter forms naturally in warm climates with a regular dry season that dries out the urine-soaked earth, leaving nitrous salts. Until sources were found in Chile, most saltpeter came from India, collected from “the bottoms of the tanks or shallow ponds of water, which, in this country, are often of great extent, where the water being evaporated by the heat of the sun, large quantities of filth are left to corrupt, which furnishes a mud of strongest nitrous quality.”
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