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Guy Halsall. Warfare and society in the barbarian West, 450-900.
Of all the problems facing the student of early medieval warfare, the most intractable is that of finding out what actually happened on the battlefield; here our perennial problem of the inadequacy of the sources becomes particularly acute. All we can say with any certainty is that the early medieval battle was a dense concentration of the most intense and extreme human emotions: men killed and maimed, died and experienced horrendous pain, felt terror and rage, showed bravery, heroism, cruelty and cowardice.
The sources’ accounts are usually stereotypical; descriptions of battles were very often the occasion for archaic language, literary borrowings and other devices designed to show off the writer’s skill. Asser describes King Alfred attacking the Viking Great Army at Edington cum densa testudine (‘in a dense testudo’), but it is unlikely that any precise formation is meant, or that any significance is to be deduced from the fact that the Vikings are not described as forming a testudo, as they are earlier in the work (see below). The word is chosen simply to illustrate classical learning, though it may have been selected because it was a reasonable approximation to a ninth-century shield-wall. It is certainly not possible to deduce that the English had actually formed a Roman testudo (a formation where legionaries’ shields were locked to the front, sides and above their heads, to make a shelter almost impervious to missile fire), and possibly not even that the English were fighting on foot.
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Most accounts of battles in chronicles or other narrative sources offer far less detail than is to be gleaned from these two accounts. In fact, Lars Lönnroth’s fine comment on early skaldic verse may stand for the textual study of almost all early medieval accounts of battle:
[I]n most cases, we only learn, after having straightened out the inverted syntax and deciphered the intricate metaphors, that some great ruler, attended by brave warriors, defeated his enemies at such-and-such a place, thus making the life of local corpse-eating wolves and ravens a little happier.
The standardised and laconic nature of battle descriptions makes it difficult to make precise statements about tactics, and received wisdom, such as just referred to, about whether armies did or did not use cavalry, is often based upon no more than a priori assumption.
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In the 830s, a large force was raised by Emperor Louis the Pious’ supporters to drive out Lothar’s adherents from the Breton March. Lothar’s men, says the experienced soldier Nithard, were less numerous than Louis’ ‘but at least they all moved as one man. Wido’s [Louis’ commander’s] large army made him and his men secure but quarrelsome and disorganised. No wonder they fled when it came to battle.’ A similar point emerges from the Earlier Annals of Metz’s account of the battle of Vinchy, 124 years earlier. They describe the Neustrian Frankish army as ‘a huge army but one indeed mixed with the common people’. Charles Martel’s Austrasian army, however, was ‘a lesser host but [made up of] men very well tested for battle’. In 882, a crowd of locals from around the monastery of Prüm assembled to attack the Viking army. According to the abbot, Regino, the Vikings were not in the least bit frightened by this mob, ‘denuded of any military discipline’, but rushed upon them with a shout and slaughtered them like beasts. The knowledge that the rear ranks were unreliable would distract even battle-hardened warriors. Panic spreads, and the flight of large numbers of understandably frightened peasants would probably spell doom for the whole army. As we shall see, the flight of one part of an early medieval battle-line usually brought about the defeat of the whole. If the expedient was used, as in other periods, earlier and more recent, of pinning the least experienced troops between a front rank of the best warriors and a rear rank of the next best, this would reduce the numbers of hardened warriors committed to fighting ‘at the sharp end’. Though Napoleon may have thought that God was ‘on the side of the big battalions’, in our period, as the Chronicle of Alfonso III put it, ‘the Lord does not count spears but offers the palm of victory to whomsoever he will’. The quote surely shows that early medieval commanders did consider the relative size of their armies but also, clearly, that things other than the supposedly eternal ‘Doctrine of Overwhelming Force’ could prey on their minds.
The New Cambridge Modern History: Volume 3, Counter-Reformation and Price Revolution, 1559-1610.
In every year of the two generations that followed the treaty of Cateau-Cambresis in 1559 European soldiers were somewhere engaged in battle, skirmish or siege. Few of these actions were on a large scale and none of them was decisive.
Jeremy Black. A Military Revolution? Military Change and European Society, 1550-1800.
The battles of the Thirty Years War, unlike some of the famous encounters in the Italian wars, were not generally determined by different tactics and weaponry. Instead their results reflected differing experience and morale and if forces were fairly evenly matched in terms of veterans they were either inconclusive encounters or determined by other factors, such as terrain, the availability and employment of reserves and the results of the cavalry encounters on the flanks which, if conclusive, could lead to the victorious cavalry attacking their opponent's infantry in flank or rear, as happened at the Spanish defeat at Rocroi (1643). Duke Bernard of Saxe-Weimar, a German prince who served Sweden in 1630-5 before transferring with the army he had raised to French service, won a number of battles by outmanoeuvring his opponents, outflanking them and attacking them in the rear. At Jankov (1645) the Swedes under Torstensson were initially unable to defeat the Austrian force, which was also about 15,000 strong, but finally won as a result of outmanoeuvring their opponents and attacking them from the rear. The Austrians lost their army, the Swedes benefited from the tactical flexibility of their more experienced force.
Indeed victory commonly went to the larger army and the more experienced force rather than to that which had adopted Dutch-style tactics. At Rocroi there were 24,000 French to 17,000 Spaniards; at the White Mountain (1620) 28,000 in the army of the Catholic League against 21,000 Bohemians and German Protestants; at Nordlingen (1634) 33,000 Catholics to 25,000 Protestants; at Breitenfeld Gustavus Adolphus outnumbered his opponents by 42,000 to 35,000. Breitenfeld was the largest battle, in terms of man-power, of the war and exceptionally so for a conflict in which field armies were rarely more than 30,000 strong and the creation of larger forces posed major logistical problems. Liitzen (1632), where the two forces were about the same, each 19,000 strong, was partly for that reason essentially inconclusive.
The Saxons at Breitenfeld adopted the Dutch tactics of small units deployed in relatively narrow formations, but they broke when the Austrians attacked. Ernest, Count of Mansfeld, a leading anti-Habsburg general of the early years of the war, also adopted Dutch tactics without conspicuous success. Victory tended in general to go to larger armies, especially if more experienced, as the Spaniards, Swedes, Weimarians and some of the Austrian and Bavarian units were. Saxe-Weimar rejected the Dutch tactics and in the late 1630s used his heavily cavalry-based army, which was essentially self-sustaining, to fight in an aggressive fashion. Thus, consideration of the battles of the period suggests that Roberts' stress on new infantry tactics is misleading.