...what? What is this?!
I don't understand some scholars. They just don't make sense.
Also, 'received opinion' needs to be taken out the back and beaten with the stick of thinking. Citing someone as 'great' when they are patently wrong repeatedly is stupid. It's particularly bad when they were taken to task for their mistakes fifty years before you started to gush about how wonderful they are.
But that's not even close to the worst part of all this. Thanks to historians like Gibbon (may he rot), writing centuries ago, the idea of the 'Dark Ages' and 'primitive' Medieval period has pervaded medieval histories. No matter how many times these antiquated ideas get quashed, they rise up again from the depths. It doesn't matter that they were working based on assumptions based on their own environments, oh no. Never mind that some of them actually had agendas. ARGH.
Thanks to a number of less blinkered modern historians, these perceptions, at least at a scholarly level, do seem to be changing. Unfortunately, it still takes an unbelievable amount of effort to topple ideas that just don't correspond with our evidence and in some areas it's particularly bad. 'History from below' and similar methodologies (not the ideal term but I'm trying to get my thoughts out quickly) have helped to show that a lot of our basic assumptions (based on the works of ye olde scholars) are inaccurate or down-right wrong.
This may be because these new ways of dealing with the past are predominantly pursued by a newer generation whose opinons are less set in stone - or for some other reason, I don't know. I can't do everything around here! But the interest in 'history from below', which I see as vital to understanding history, has had a couple of unfortunate side effects. 'Boy history', as Mrs Reynald de Chattilon is fond of calling it (that is, military and political history), has been much slower to slough off the older arguments. And in nowhere is this more clear than in medieval military history.
I might be unusual in that I'm interested in both these areas, but even if that is so, it doesn't explain the things I keep reading, time and again, which are apparently based on nothing. Delbrück, the Clausewitz-ian (my term, clearly) historian, decided that medieval warfare was essentially individualist, primitive and stupid. His entire writing on the topic displays poor use of sources and a number of conclusions based on faulty assumptions. Verbruggen cut Delbrück to pieces in his work, but it's been almost ignored by modern historians. I have my own conspiracy theories about this which relate to another 'great' historian of medieval warfare, Smail. He published shortly after Verbruggen and somehow managed to completely eclipse the Belgian, who, in an edited and expanded edition of his original work, showed a number of holes in Smail's work. Almost no-one acknowledges Verbruggen, which is strange, because he makes his arguments much more incisively than Smail, particularly in his criticism of Delbrück; Verbruggen is especially sharp on Delbrück's use of sources and suggests that the German lacked familiarity with them, being over-reliant on his students.
I see Verbruggen as having been hard-done-by, but that isn't the point I'm laboriously working towards. It's more of a quick aside...
Delbrück considered that there was no idea of combined arms in the Medieval period and consequently concluded that, in essence, medieval soldiers and leaders had no genuine conception of military theory. He asserted that the pedites of the period could not be labelled as infantry because there was insufficient distinction in their roles and that until the ascension of the Swiss armies they lacked the necessary discipline.
Smail's 'fighting march', an idea that captured the imagination of a number of later historians, would suggest that this analysis is flawed at the least, but Smail declines to overtly criticise Delbrück, to my continuing frustration. His work could and should have been the one which showed Delbrück's view as lacking in understanding but he never really followed through sufficiently. Verbruggen made the important point that Smail studied individual battles in more depth than earlier writers - a laudable effort - but simply did not go far enough.
And while I like Verbruggen, his work has it's own problems. Despite his insistence on the importance of primary sources he misses a number of important ones and under-uses others, particularly when he deals with the Crusades and the Holy Land.
Making all of this so irritating is the point that all these scholars did excellent work - they get used regularly thanks in no small part to the quality of their analysis and research. But their petty biases and ideas, drawing so often more on their own times than the period they discussed, have been passed along at the same time. As they have shown in their consecutive criticisms of each other, it is more than possible to extract good information and leave behind the less useful aspects, exactly as one does with so many medieval sources; I cannot help but wonder why doing so with their work has proved to be so rare.
I am increasingly convinced that what we have in Medieval warfare is not some slide backward into simplistic, idiotic ideas of horde tactics, but a more complex system that reflected a genuine understanding of the manner in which war is carried out. Medieval leaders faced entirely different circumstances from ancient and modern leaders, socially, politically, economically, technologically...keep adding the '-ally' suffix ad nauseam. The sources just don't match the argument for primitivism. We see, for example, cases of combined arms being used effectively and even causal relations between the failure of different branches of armies to work together and their defeat. We see leaders who are consistently successful on the battlefield, regularly enough to wonder if there might be more to this than just having more men.
I don't really have more of a conclusion than that yet, which is unfortunate because I'm writing an essay on all this at the moment and I'd like to have a core idea that isn't "You're all wroooooooooong..." because while I think it's sort of true, finding a citation could be hard.
Quick! Somebody publish something! Go go gadget citations!
C'mon guys, people are staring...
Also, 'received opinion' needs to be taken out the back and beaten with the stick of thinking. Citing someone as 'great' when they are patently wrong repeatedly is stupid. It's particularly bad when they were taken to task for their mistakes fifty years before you started to gush about how wonderful they are.
But that's not even close to the worst part of all this. Thanks to historians like Gibbon (may he rot), writing centuries ago, the idea of the 'Dark Ages' and 'primitive' Medieval period has pervaded medieval histories. No matter how many times these antiquated ideas get quashed, they rise up again from the depths. It doesn't matter that they were working based on assumptions based on their own environments, oh no. Never mind that some of them actually had agendas. ARGH.
Thanks to a number of less blinkered modern historians, these perceptions, at least at a scholarly level, do seem to be changing. Unfortunately, it still takes an unbelievable amount of effort to topple ideas that just don't correspond with our evidence and in some areas it's particularly bad. 'History from below' and similar methodologies (not the ideal term but I'm trying to get my thoughts out quickly) have helped to show that a lot of our basic assumptions (based on the works of ye olde scholars) are inaccurate or down-right wrong.
This may be because these new ways of dealing with the past are predominantly pursued by a newer generation whose opinons are less set in stone - or for some other reason, I don't know. I can't do everything around here! But the interest in 'history from below', which I see as vital to understanding history, has had a couple of unfortunate side effects. 'Boy history', as Mrs Reynald de Chattilon is fond of calling it (that is, military and political history), has been much slower to slough off the older arguments. And in nowhere is this more clear than in medieval military history.
I might be unusual in that I'm interested in both these areas, but even if that is so, it doesn't explain the things I keep reading, time and again, which are apparently based on nothing. Delbrück, the Clausewitz-ian (my term, clearly) historian, decided that medieval warfare was essentially individualist, primitive and stupid. His entire writing on the topic displays poor use of sources and a number of conclusions based on faulty assumptions. Verbruggen cut Delbrück to pieces in his work, but it's been almost ignored by modern historians. I have my own conspiracy theories about this which relate to another 'great' historian of medieval warfare, Smail. He published shortly after Verbruggen and somehow managed to completely eclipse the Belgian, who, in an edited and expanded edition of his original work, showed a number of holes in Smail's work. Almost no-one acknowledges Verbruggen, which is strange, because he makes his arguments much more incisively than Smail, particularly in his criticism of Delbrück; Verbruggen is especially sharp on Delbrück's use of sources and suggests that the German lacked familiarity with them, being over-reliant on his students.
I see Verbruggen as having been hard-done-by, but that isn't the point I'm laboriously working towards. It's more of a quick aside...
Delbrück considered that there was no idea of combined arms in the Medieval period and consequently concluded that, in essence, medieval soldiers and leaders had no genuine conception of military theory. He asserted that the pedites of the period could not be labelled as infantry because there was insufficient distinction in their roles and that until the ascension of the Swiss armies they lacked the necessary discipline.
Smail's 'fighting march', an idea that captured the imagination of a number of later historians, would suggest that this analysis is flawed at the least, but Smail declines to overtly criticise Delbrück, to my continuing frustration. His work could and should have been the one which showed Delbrück's view as lacking in understanding but he never really followed through sufficiently. Verbruggen made the important point that Smail studied individual battles in more depth than earlier writers - a laudable effort - but simply did not go far enough.
And while I like Verbruggen, his work has it's own problems. Despite his insistence on the importance of primary sources he misses a number of important ones and under-uses others, particularly when he deals with the Crusades and the Holy Land.
Making all of this so irritating is the point that all these scholars did excellent work - they get used regularly thanks in no small part to the quality of their analysis and research. But their petty biases and ideas, drawing so often more on their own times than the period they discussed, have been passed along at the same time. As they have shown in their consecutive criticisms of each other, it is more than possible to extract good information and leave behind the less useful aspects, exactly as one does with so many medieval sources; I cannot help but wonder why doing so with their work has proved to be so rare.
I am increasingly convinced that what we have in Medieval warfare is not some slide backward into simplistic, idiotic ideas of horde tactics, but a more complex system that reflected a genuine understanding of the manner in which war is carried out. Medieval leaders faced entirely different circumstances from ancient and modern leaders, socially, politically, economically, technologically...keep adding the '-ally' suffix ad nauseam. The sources just don't match the argument for primitivism. We see, for example, cases of combined arms being used effectively and even causal relations between the failure of different branches of armies to work together and their defeat. We see leaders who are consistently successful on the battlefield, regularly enough to wonder if there might be more to this than just having more men.
I don't really have more of a conclusion than that yet, which is unfortunate because I'm writing an essay on all this at the moment and I'd like to have a core idea that isn't "You're all wroooooooooong..." because while I think it's sort of true, finding a citation could be hard.
Quick! Somebody publish something! Go go gadget citations!
C'mon guys, people are staring...