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War
전쟁(戰爭)
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| The Technology of War |
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2 MILITARY TECHNOLOGY BEFORE THE MODERN ERA
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The beginning of the age of cavalry
in Europe is traditionally dated to the destruction of the legions of the Roman
emperor Valens by Gothic horsemen at the Battle of Adrianople in AD 378. The
period that followed, characterized by the network of political and economic
relationships called feudalism, was an age during which the mounted arm assumed
an ascendancy that it began to relinquish only in the 14th century, with the
appearance of infantry capable of taking the open field unsupported against
mounted chivalry. Cavalry, however, was only part of the story of this era.
However impressive the mounted knight may have
been in battle, he required a secure place of replenishment and refuge. This was
provided by the seigneurial fortress, or castle. In a military sense, European
feudalism rested on a symbiotic relationship between armoured man-at-arms,
war-horse, and castle. |
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The tactical dominance in Europe of the
heavy mounted elites had a number of complex causes. It is clear that a basic
reorientation of the means of production and of the social distribution of the
means of armed violence was involved. Horses
required large quantities of grain, and in an agricultural economy where returns
on seed grain were as little as 2 to 1, mounted shock action could not have
solidified its dominance without improvements in agricultural production.
Perhaps ironically, these improvements seem to have involved the development of
a means of harnessing the horse to agricultural transport and the
plow--particularly beginning in the 14th century, when seed-to-yield ratios
began to improve. |
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The age of heavy shock
cavalry did not come on suddenly, ushered in by the stirrup or any other
single invention. Improvements in the breeding of war-horses played a major and
perhaps dominant role. The Germanic tribes that pressed against the boundaries
of Rome from the 3rd century on may have made a breakthrough in horse breeding,
and, in the Arab conquests of the 7th century and following, the superior breed
of the Arabian horse was a major determinant of tactical success. The stirrup
alone meant little without powerful war-horses and supporting technologies such
as saddle, girth, and bridle. |
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Using scattered artistic and
archaeological evidence, historians have constructed an approximate chronology
of technological innovation in medieval Europe. The war saddle
with a single girth was introduced by the 6th century, and the iron stirrup was
common by the 7th (having probably been known earlier in the East). The curb
bit, vitally important for controlling a war-horse, probably dates from about
the same time. According to literary evidence, iron horseshoes date from the end
of the 9th century, and, based on pictorial evidence, spurs date from the 11th.
By the 12th century the European knight was using a war saddle with high,
wraparound cantle and pommel that protected the genitals and held him securely
in his seat; the saddle itself was secured to the horse by a double girth that
held it firmly in place fore and aft. These developments welded horse and rider
into a single unit and enabled the knight to apply much of the force of his
horse's charge to the point of the lance, held couched beneath the arm, without
being driven over the horse's rump on impact. An associated development dating
from the end of the 12th century was the incorporation of a rigid backplate into
knightly armour; this, backed with several inches of padding, braced the
man-at-arms against the shock of head-on impact and protected his kidneys from
the cantle. These developments were accompanied, and in part caused, by
increases in the size and power of war-horses and steady improvements in
personal armour. |
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The destrier, or medieval war-horse, was
central to the tactical viability of European feudalism. This animal was a
product of two great migrations of horses originating in Central Asia. One,
moving westward, crossed into Europe and there originated the vast herds of
primeval animals that eventually roamed almost the entire continent. The second
flowed to the southwest and found its way into Asia Minor and the neighbouring
lands of Persia, India, and Arabia. Ultimately it crossed into Egypt, then
spread from that country along all of North Africa. At the same time it crossed
from Asia Minor into Greece and spread along the northern shores of the
Mediterranean. |
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There were two channels through which
the horses of Arabia and North Africa were distributed into northern Europe. One
was through the conquest of the Romans across the Alps into France and the Low
Countries, where, previously, descendants of the horses of Central Asia had
constituted the equine population. The other channel led northward through
Greece, Macedonia, and the Gothic countries into the land of the Vandals.
When these barbarian peoples invaded the empire, the vast number of horses that
they possessed helped them to overthrow the Romans. The era that followed
witnessed the collapse of the Roman breeds and the gradual
development--especially during the era of Charlemagne in the late 8th and early
9th centuries--of improved types, owing largely to the importation of Arabian
stock. The most important of these was the "great horse," which
originated in the Low Countries; its size and strength were required to carry
the heavy load of the armoured knight. These horses, the ancestors of modern
draft breeds, were bred from the largest and most powerful of the northern
European horses, but there was apparently an admixture of Arabian breeds as
well. (see also Arabian horse, animal
breeding) |
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The Crusades of the 12th and 13th
centuries took the nobility of Europe into the native land of the Arabian horse.
The speed and agility of these light horses so impressed them that large numbers
were imported into England and France. Over a long period of time the Moors took
Arabian and North African horses into Spain, where they were crossed with the
native stock and produced the superior breeds that were sought after by other
nations. (Spanish horses were also taken to the New World, where they became the
principal ancestors of the equine population of North and South America.) |
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The breeding, care, and maintenance of
medieval war-horses, and the mastering of the skills of mounted combat, required
immense amounts of time, skill, and resources. Horses strong enough to be ridden
did not exist everywhere, and European horses in particular tended to revert in
a feral state to a small animal not much larger than a Shetland pony. On the
other hand, the horse was genetically tractable, and breeders learned that hard
inbreeding could produce larger, more powerful animals. Still, it was difficult
to establish a breed, and only careful control of bloodlines could maintain one.
While crossbreeding could produce size and power, it also promoted instability
and was best abandoned as soon as the desired traits were "fixed."
This was not easy, particularly where the resources available to maintain a
nonproductive breeding stock were limited. The net result was that breeds of
large, powerful horses suitable for mounted combat were difficult to establish
and expensive to maintain, and they were often lost in the turmoil of war. Even
when herds were not dispersed or destroyed, a breed could be lost through
indiscriminate breeding arising from a need for numbers. |
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The availability to mounted warrior
elites of iron armour of high quality,
particularly mail, was instrumental in the fall of Rome and in the establishment
of European feudalism. Until the 10th century, however, there was little
qualitative difference between the body armour of the western European knight
and the Roman legionnaire's lorica hamata.
Then, during the 11th century, the sleeves of the knight's mail shirt, or
byrnie, became longer and closer-fitting, extending downward from the middle of
the upper arm to the wrist; at the same time, the hem of the byrnie dropped from
just above to just below the kneecap. Knights began wearing the gambeson, a
quilted garment of leather or canvas, beneath their mail for additional
protection and to cushion the shock of blows. (Ordinary soldiers often wore a
gambeson as their only protection.) Use of the surcoat,
a light garment worn over the knight's armour, became general during this
period. Both gambeson and surcoat may have been Arab imports, adopted as a
result of exposure to Muslim technology during the Crusades. |
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Norman men-at-arms were protected by a
knee-length mail shirt called a hauberk, which was a later version of the Saxon
byrnie that was split to permit the wearer to sit astride his horse. Though
11th-century men-at-arms probably did not have complete mail trousers, the
hauberk apparently had inserts of cloth or leather, giving the same effect. It
also included a hoodlike garment of mail worn over the head to protect the neck
and throat; this had a hole for the face much like a modern ski cap. The hood
was backed by padding of cloth or leather, and a pointed iron helmet with nasal
(a vertical bar protecting the nose) was worn over it. The knight's defensive
equipment was completed by a large, kite-shaped shield, nearly two-thirds the
height of its owner. The size of this shield was testimony to the incomplete
protection offered by the hauberk. |
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During the 12th century the open helmet
with nasal evolved into the pot helm, or casque. This was an involved process,
with the crown of the helmet losing its pointed shape to become flat and the
nasal expanding to cover the entire face except for small vision slits and
breathing holes. The late 12th-century helm was typically a barrel-shaped
affair; however, more sophisticated designs with hinged visors appeared as well.
The helm was extremely heavy, and the entire weight was borne by the neck; for
this reason it was only donned immediately before combat. Some knights preferred
a mail coif, no doubt with heavy padding and perhaps an iron cap beneath. One
12th-century depiction shows an iron visor worn over a coif of mail. |
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By the early 13th century European
amourers had learned to make mail with a sufficiently fine mesh to provide
protection to the hand. At first this was in the form of mittens with a
leather-lined hole in the palm through which the knight could thrust his hand
when out of action; by mid-century the armourer's skill had developed to the
point of making complete gloves of mail. |
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The earliest knightly plate
armour appeared shortly after 1200 in the form of thin plates worn
beneath the gambeson. External plate armour began to appear around the middle of
the century, at first for elbows, kneecaps, and shins. The true plate cuirass
appeared about 1250, though it was at first unwieldy, covering only the front of
the torso and no doubt placing considerable stress on the underlying garments to
which it was attached. Perhaps in part for this reason, the breastplate was
followed shortly by the backplate. From the late 13th century, plate protection
spread from the knees and elbows to encompass the extremities; square plates
called ailettes, which protected the shoulder, made a brief appearance between
about 1290 and 1325 before giving way to jointed plate defenses that covered the
gap between breastplate and upper-arm defenses. Helmets with hinged visors
appeared about 1300, and by mid-century armourers were constructing closed,
visored helms that rested directly on the shoulder defenses. Plate armour, at
first worn above mail as reinforcement, began to replace it entirely except in
areas such as the crotch, the armpits, and the back of the knees, where the
armourer's skill could not devise a sufficiently flexible joint. In response to
this enhanced coverage, the knight's large, kite-shaped shield evolved into a
much smaller implement. |
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Figure 1: Gothic-style armour for man and horse. Made at Landshut,
Bavaria, about 1480, this. . .
Reproduced
by permission of the Trustees of the Wallace Collection, London
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The first suits of full plate armour
date from the first decades of the 15th century. By 1440 the Gothic style of
plate armour was well developed, representing the ultimate development of
personal armour protection (see Figure 1).
Armourers were making gloves with individually jointed fingers, and shoulder
defenses had become particularly sophisticated, permitting the man-at-arms full
freedom to wield sword, lance, or mace with a minimum of exposure. Also during
the 15th century the weight of personal armour increased, partly because of the
importance of shock tactics in European warfare and partly because of the
demands of jousting, a form of mock combat in
which two armoured knights, separated by a low fence or barrier, rode at each
other head-on and attempted to unseat each other with blunted lances. As armour
protection became more complete and heavier, larger breeds of horses appeared.
Mail protection for horses became common in the 13th century; by the 15th, plate
horse armour was used extensively. |
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The unprecedented protection that plate
armour gave the man-at-arms did not come without tactical, as well as economic,
cost. A closed helm seriously interfered with vision and made voice
communication in battle impossible. No doubt in response to this, heraldry
emerged during this period and the armorial surcoat became a standard item of
knightly dress. Ultimately, the thickness of iron needed to stop missiles--at
first arrows and crossbow bolts, then harquebus and musket balls--made armour so
heavy as to be impractical for active service. By the 16th century, armour was
largely ceremonial and decorative, with increasingly elaborate ornamentation. |
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The earliest distinctive European fortification
characteristic of feudal patterns of social organization and warfare was the motte-and-bailey
castle, which appeared in the 10th and 11th centuries between the Rhine
and Loire rivers and eventually spread to most of western Europe. The
motte-and-bailey castle consisted of an elevated mound of earth, called the motte,
which was crowned with a timber palisade and surrounded by a defensive ditch
that also separated the motte from a palisaded outer compound, called the
bailey. Access to the motte was by means of an elevated bridge across the ditch
from the bailey. The earliest motte-and-bailey castles were built where the
ground was suitable and timber available, these factors apparently taking
precedence over considerations such as proximity to arable land or trade routes.
Later on, as feudal social and economic relationships became more entrenched,
castles were sited more for economic, tactical, and strategic advantage and were
built of imported stone. The timber palisade was replaced with a keep, or
donjon, of dressed stone, and the entire enclosure, called the enceinte, was
surrounded by a wall. |
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The motte-and-bailey castle was not the
only pattern of European fortification. There was, for example, a tradition of
fortified towns, stemming from Roman fortification, that enjoyed a tenuous
existence throughout the Dark Ages, particularly in the Mediterranean world. |
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The greatest weakness of timber
fortifications was vulnerability to fire; in addition, a determined attacker,
given enough archers to achieve fire dominance over the palisade, could quickly
chop his way in. A stone curtain wall, on the other hand, had none of these
deficiencies. It could be made high enough to frustrate improvised escalade and,
unlike a wooden palisade, could be fitted with a parapet and crenellated firing
positions along the top to give cover to defending archers and crossbowmen.
Stone required little maintenance or upkeep, and it suffered by comparison with
timber only in the high capital investment required to build with it. |
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Given walls high enough to defeat casual
escalade, the prime threats to stone fortresses were the battering ram and
attempts to pry chunks out of the wall or undermine it. Since these tactics
benefited from an unprotected footing at the base of the wall, most of the
refinements of medieval fortress architecture were intended to deny an
undisturbed approach. Where terrain permitted, a moat was dug around the
enceinte. Towers were made with massive, protruding feet to frustrate attempts
at mining. Protruding towers also enabled defenders to bring flanking fire along
the face and foot of the wall, and the towers were made higher than the wall to
give additional range to archers and crossbowmen. The walls themselves were
fitted with provisions for hoardings, which were overhanging wooden galleries
from which arrows, stones, and unpleasant substances such as boiling tar and
pitch could be dropped or poured on an attacker. Hoardings gave way to machicolations,
permanent overhanging galleries of stone that became a distinctive feature of
medieval European fortress architecture. |
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Castle entrances, which were few and
small to begin with, were protected by barbicans, low-lying outworks dominated
by the walls and towers behind. Gates were generally deeply recessed and backed
by a portcullis, a latticework grate suspended in a slot that could be dropped
quickly to prevent surprise entry. The gate could also be sealed by means of a
drawbridge. These measures were sufficiently effective that medieval sieges were
settled more often by treachery, starvation, or disease than by breached walls
and undermined towers. |
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The most basic means of taking a
fortress were to storm the gate or go over the wall by simple escalade using
ladders, but these methods rarely succeeded except by surprise or treachery.
Beginning in the 9th century, European engineers constructed wheeled wooden
siege towers, called belfroys. These were fitted with drawbridges, which could
be dropped onto the parapet, and with protected firing positions from which the
defending parapets could be swept by arrow fire. Constructing one of these
towers and moving it forward against an active defense was a considerable feat
of engineering and arms. Typically, the moat had to be filled and leveled, all
under defensive fire, and attempts to burn or dismount the tower had to be
prevented. The wooden towers were vulnerable to fire, so that their faces were
generally covered with hides. |
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Battering rams
were capable of bringing down sections of wall, given sufficient time, manpower,
and determination. Large battering rams were mounted on wheels and were covered
by a mobile shed for protection from defensive fire. |
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The most powerful method of direct
attack on the structure of a fortress was mining, digging a gallery beneath the
walls and supporting the gallery with wooden shoring. Once completed, the mine
was fired to burn away the shoring; this collapsed the gallery and brought down
the walls. Mining, of course, required suitable ground and was susceptible to
countermining by an alert defender. |
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In general, the mechanical artillery of
medieval times was inferior to that of the Classical world. The one exception
was the trebuchet, an engine
worked by counterpoise. Counterpoise engines appeared in the 12th century and
largely replaced torsion engines by the middle of the 13th. The trebuchet worked
something like a seesaw. Suspended from an elevated wooden frame, the arm of the
trebuchet pivoted from a point about one-quarter of the way down its length. A
large weight, or counterpoise, was suspended from the short end, and the long
end was fitted with a hollowed-out spoonlike cavity or a sling. (A sling added
substantially to the trebuchet's range.) The long end was winched down, raising
the counterpoise; a stone or other missile was put into the spoon or sling, and
the arm was released to fly upward, hurling the missile in a high, looping arc
toward its target. Though almost anything could be thrown, spherical projectiles
of cut stone were the preferred ammunition. |
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Trebuchets might have a fixed
counterpoise, a pivoted counterpoise, or a counterpoise that could be slid up
and down the arm to adjust for range. Ropes were frequently attached to the
counterpoise to be pulled on for extra power. Modern experiments suggest that a
trebuchet with an arm about 50 feet (15 metres) long would have been capable of
throwing a 300-pound (135-kilogram) stone to a distance of 300 yards (275
metres); such a trebuchet would have had a counterpoise of about 10 tons. Though
the rate of fire was slow, and prodigious quantities of timber and labour were
required to build and serve one, a large trebuchet could do serious damage to
stone fortifications. The machines were apparently quite accurate, and small
trebuchets were useful in sweeping parapets of archers and crossbowmen. |
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Greek fire
was a weapon that had a decisive tactical and strategic impact in the defense of
the Byzantine Empire. It was first used against the Arabs at the siege of
Constantinople of 673. Greek fire was a liquid that ignited on contact with
seawater. It was viscous and burned fiercely, even in water. Sand and--according
to legend--urine were the only effective means of extinguishing the flames. It
was expelled by a pumplike device similar to a 19th-century hand-pumped fire
engine, and it may also have been thrown from catapults in breakable containers.
Although the exact ingredients of Greek fire were a Byzantine state secret,
other powers eventually developed and used similar compositions. The original
formula was lost and remains unknown. The most likely ingredients were colloidal
suspensions of metallic sodium, lithium, or potassium--or perhaps quicklime--in
a petroleum base. |
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Greek fire was particularly effective in
naval combat, and it constituted one of the few incendiary weapons of warfare
afloat that were used effectively without backfiring on their users. It may have
been used following the sack of Constantinople by Venetian-supported crusaders
in 1204, but it probably disappeared from use after the fall of Constantinople
to the Turks in 1453. |
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The age of cavalry came to be viewed
from a European perspective, since it was there that infantry was overthrown and
there that the greatest and most far-reaching changes occurred. But it was by no
means an exclusively European phenomenon; to the contrary, the mounted warrior's
tactical supremacy was less complete in western Europe than in any other region
of comparably advanced technology save Japan, where a strikingly parallel feudal
situation prevailed. Indeed, from the 1st century AD nomadic horse archers had
strengthened their hold over the Eurasian Steppes, the Iranian plateau, and the
edges of the Fertile Crescent, and, in a series of waves extending through
medieval times, they entered Europe, China, and India and even touched Japan
briefly in the 13th century. The most important of these incursions into the
European and Chinese military ecospheres left notable marks on the military
technology of East Asia and the Byzantine Empire, as well as on the kingdoms of
Europe. |
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The first of the major horse nomad
incursions into Europe were the Hunnish invasions of the 4th century. The Huns'
primary significance in the history of military technology was in expanding the
use of the composite recurved bow into the eastern Roman Empire. This important
instance of technological borrowing constituted one of the few times in which a
traditional military skill as physiologically and economically demanding as
composite archery was successfully transplanted out of its original cultural
context. |
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The Avars
of the 6th and 7th centuries were familiar with the stirrup, and they may have
introduced it into Europe. Some of the earliest unequivocal evidence of the use
of the stirrup comes from Avar graves. |
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Although they continued to make
effective use of both shock and missile infantry, the Byzantines turned to
cavalry earlier and more completely than did the western Roman Empire. After an
extended period of dependence on Teutonic and Hunnish mercenary cavalry, the
reforms of the emperors Maurice and Heraclius in the 6th and 7th centuries
developed an effective provincial militia based on the institution of pronoia,
the award of nonhereditary grants of land capable of supporting an armoured
horse archer called a cataphract. Pronoia,
which formed the core of the Byzantine army's strength during the period of its
greatest efficiency in the 8th through 10th centuries, entailed the adoption of
the Hunnish composite recurved bow by native troopers. (see also Byzantine
Empire, pronoia system) |
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The Byzantine cataphract was armed with
bow, lance, sword, and dagger; he wore a shirt of mail or scale armour and an
iron helm and carried a small, round, ironbound shield of wood that could be
strapped to the forearm or slung from the waist. The foreheads and breasts of
officers' horses and those of men in the front rank were protected with
frontlets and poitrels of iron. The militia cataphracts were backed by units of
similarly armed regulars and mercenary regiments of Teutonic heavy shock cavalry
of the imperial guard. Mercenary horse archers from the steppe continued to be
used as light cavalry. |
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The infiltration of Turkish tribes into
the Eurasian military ecosphere was distinguished from earlier steppe nomad
invasions in that the raiders were absorbed culturally through Islamization.
The long-term results of this wave of nomadic horse archers were profound,
leading to the extinction of the Byzantine Empire. |
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Turkish horse archers, of whom the Seljuqs
were representative, were lightly armoured and mounted but extremely mobile.
Their armour generally consisted of an iron helmet and, perhaps, a shirt of mail
or scale armour (called brigandine). They carried small, light, one-handed
shields, usually of wicker fitted with an iron boss. Their principal offensive
arms were lance, sabre, and bow. The Turkish bow developed in response to the
demands of mounted combat against lightly armoured adversaries on the open
steppe; as a consequence, it seems to have had greater range but less
penetrative and knockdown power at medium and short ranges than its Byzantine
equivalents. Turkish horses, though hardy and agile, were not as large or
powerful as Byzantine chargers. Therefore, Turkish horse archers could not stand
up to a charge of Byzantine cataphracts, but their greater mobility generally
enabled them to stay out of reach and fire arrows from a distance, wearing their
adversaries down and killing their horses. |
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The 13th-century Mongol armies of
Genghis Khan and his immediate successors depended on large herds of grass-fed
Mongolian ponies, as many as six or eight to a warrior. The ponies were
relatively small but agile and hardy, well-adapted to the harsh climate of the
steppes. The Mongol warrior's principal weapon was the composite recurved bow,
of which he might carry as many as three. Characteristically, each man carried a
short bow for use from the saddle and a long bow for use on foot. The former,
firing light arrows, was for skirmishing and long-range harassing fire; the
latter had the advantage in killing power at medium ranges. The saddle bow was
probably capable of sending a light arrow more than 500 yards; the heart of the
long bow's engagement envelope would have been about 100-350 yards, close to
that of the contemporary English longbow. Each warrior carried several extra
quivers of arrows on campaign. He also carried a sabre or scimitar, a lasso, and
perhaps a lance. Personal armour included a helmet and breastplate of iron or
lacquered leather, though some troops wore shirts of scale or mail. (see also Yüan
dynasty, composite bow) |
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Mongol armies were proficient at
military engineering and made extensive use of Chinese technology, including
catapults and incendiary devices. These latter probably included predecessors of
gunpowder, of which the Mongols were the likely vehicle of introduction into
western Europe. |
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