9 - Reframing the Conversation on Medieval Military Strategy

Summary

In 2010, Beatrice Heuser published a book entitled Thinking War: The Evolution of Strategy from Antiquity to the Present. In his review in the Journal of Military History, Andrew Lambert called the book “sophisticated and wise” – “epic,” even. But Heuser has little to say about the Middle Ages, covering the entire period in just four pages. She argues that there was “little medieval literature of relevance” to her book because, “how to wage war…was…for a thousand years largely confined to the work of Vegetius.” Apparently, after De re militari, the next “text on warfare that is no longer either a historical treatise or a legal one, nor a copy of Vegetius,” is Bouvet's 1385 Tree of Battles. She then asks the begged question: “Why was there relatively little writing on the way to wage war in the Middle Ages?” The answer she considers “perhaps the most conclusive” is that, because God determined the outcome of war, there was little use speculating how to influence it. She is thus compelled to conclude that there was little intellectual basis for strategy in the Middle Ages.

Heuser's understanding of medieval religion is quaint, but her book and others like it uniformly stand on the purported absence of extant medieval strategic texts in the West (be they called manuals, treatises, or textbooks). Those manuals that did exist were textbooks of ancient works like Vegetius's De re militari. In 1921, Frederick Taylor argued that “the Middle Ages had accepted such books as authoritative and had failed to improve upon them.” His opinion has stuck: in his very recent book, Strategy:A History, Lawrence Freedman claims, “the vital lessons [on warfare] were all still believed to be contained in classical texts.” Likewise, Azar Gat's 2002 History of Military Thought posits that “[m]ilitary theory was then simply the synthesis of the best military models of the cultural past, whether in Greece or Rome”; this is evidently because “very little had changed from the classical era to Machiavelli's time.”5 It is of little wonder that B. H. Liddell Hart could summarize the issue by mocking “the drab stupidity of [the Middle Ages’] military course.” Liddell Hart saw the Middle Ages as a rather inconsequential interlude in the history of strategy and seemed to lament being forced to acknowledge them at all.