by John Keegan
Feudalism is a common stage in the transition of warrior societies to other forms. It appeared in two principal varieties. One, which characterised its rise in the West, was the grant of land to military subordinates, on condition that they supported on it the appropriate military force to be brought into the sovereign’s service when required, but carrying with it the right to bequeath the land, under the same conditions, to the feudatory’s descendants. The other, more common outside Europe, was that of the non-hereditary fief, which could be taken back into the sovereign’s hands at his dictate; it was prevalent in the Islamic world as the iqta system, and was much used by the Seljuks, Ayyubids and Ottomans. Both had their disadvantages. The iqta, because it was non-hereditary, encouraged the holder to enrich himself while the going was good; his taxpayers were exploited and his military obligation skimped.17 Feudal vassals in the West, on the other hand, though they had an interest in the good management of their fiefs, since one might be passed on to a son, had an equally strong interest in improving a fiefs military value. A vassal thereby strengthened his position in any dispute over rights or duties with his sovereign; by taking on vassals of his own and building castles, he might hope eventually to raise his house, in fact if not law, to sovereign status itself. Such was to be the history of much of western Europe between the division of the Carolingian empire in the ninth century and the coming of the gunpowder kings in the sixteenth.
Feudalism in whatever form was therefore a blind alley in the move away from warriordom. A much more effective system was the regular. It first appeared, surprisingly early, in Sumer and was brought to a scarcely improvable form by the Assyrians. The Assyrian army, as we have seen, included contingents of all the varieties of soldier then available, including, besides infantry, charioteers, mounted archers, engineers and waggoners. Its core, however, was the royal bodyguard, in which the origins of regular service may lie. The army of Sumer was probably first a royal bodyguard, around which other units congregated as need arose, and such ‘nearest guards’ were to persist thereafter in every state where power was personalised, however symbolically and however representative the basis of government, even down to our own times.
Bodyguards nevertheless were to follow a line of separate and sometimes divergent development from those of other regular forces. Those of rulers who set up fixed places of residence tended to become sedentary themselves, often to lose their warlike functions and sometimes to become kingmakers; rulers in consequence frequently recruited their bodyguards abroad, from warrior peoples who did not know a language in which to conspire with native malcontents. An example that readily suggests itself is that of the Varangian guard of the Byzantine emperors, originally formed of Swedes and Norwegians who had followed the trade routes of the ‘Rus’ down the great Russian rivers to Constantinople, but after 1066 largely of emigré Anglo-Saxons. They developed a patois of their own and have left their most celebrated memorial in the runes carved on the Lion of St Mark, exported as booty from the Piraeus after its capture from the Turks by Francesco Morosini in 1668, which now stands outside the Arsenal at Venice.18 Other famous foreign guards were the Scottish Archers of the French kings, the Arab Guard of Frederick II Hohenstaufen (General Franco raised a Moorish Guard from the Moroccan regulares who did so much to win the Spanish Civil War of 1936–9), and the Swiss guards of several European sovereigns, including, of course, the popes. It is a little advertised function of the modern Special Air Service (SAS) Regiment to provide bodyguards to foreign rulers the British government has an interest in keeping in power.19
Such bodyguards, but also those recruited from a ruler’s subjects which became sedentary in a capital, regularly tended to fossilise, often in a grotesque form: the British Yeomen of the Guard and the Papal Swiss Guard exhibit the trait, as did the vanished Bavarian Trabanters, who carried battleaxes into the nineteenth century. Some monarchs actually raised archaic guard units to exaggerate the length of their lineage, as the Hohenzollerns did with the Schlossgardekompagnie, which attended the last Kaiser dressed as if for the court of Frederick the Great. Not unnaturally, well-born young men of spirit turned their noses up at such service. They preferred to show their loyalty to a ruler in a ‘nearest guard’ that closed with the enemy. Some bodyguards thereby survived as fighting-units and many others were raised on the same model: the Prussian and Russian — Preobajensky, Semenovsky — regiments of footguards belonged to that tradition, as the British still do.
The loyalty of such units — that of the Gardes françaises in 1789 after it had been rotted by overlong residence in Paris was an exception — rarely fell into doubt. The difficulty remained, however, of how to pay for such forces, and was even more acute in the case of the regulars of the ordinary field army. It is a central element of the contract between ruler and regulars that they are fed, housed and paid in peace as well as war. Rich states with an efficient taxing power may succeed in doing so for long periods; if militarily over-ambitious they may nevertheless overtax their inhabitants, while it is frequently the case that the attempt to reduce the size of an expanded regular force at the end of a long war drives it to mutiny, as the Irish Free State found in 1923. It is therefore a temptation, particularly felt by rich states of small population, to sidestep the burden of supporting a regular army and, instead, to buy in military services as needed. That is the basis of the mercenary system. It is not the only basis; historically, many states have supplemented their forces by hiring mercenaries, often on long-term contracts, with results perfectly satisfactory to both parties, as the former relationship between the French and the Swiss, and that current between the British and the Gurkhas of Nepal, demonstrates. It is also possible to buy into a well regulated mercenary market, to which hirelings return after the expiry of their term of service; such a market existed at Cape Taenarum in the Peloponnese during the fourth century BC, supplied by landless soldiers thrown out of work after the city-state wars of the previous century, and it worked perfectly well as long as the demand for military professionals held up in Persia and then the Hellenised East.20 Alexander the Great employed some 50,000 Greek mercenaries in 329, many recruited by the market system.
The danger inherent in the resort to mercenaries is that the funds necessary to support them may dry up before the contract reaches its agreed term, or that a war goes on longer than expected, with the same result, or that, if a state has been so miserly, complacent or supine as to depend exclusively on hired soldiers, the mercenaries come to see that they constitute the effective power within it. That, of course, was the issue in several Italian city states of the fifteenth century, where citizens had become too mercantile to do duty themselves but were too mean to pay for a standing force. In such circumstances it is their employers rather than the enemy that mercenaries confront with threat: they take sides in internal quarrels, they strike or blackmail for outstanding or extra pay, they may even go over to the enemy; at the very worst they seize power for themselves, as the condottieri Pandolfo Malatesta, Ottobuono Terzo and Gabrino Fondulo did, respectively, in Brescia, Cremona and Parma.21
Some earlier city states, as if they had foreseen the dangers of reliance on mercenary hire, though that was not the reason, chose an alternative method of providing for their defence: they made it a condition of citizenship that all free men of property should purchase arms, train for war and do duty in time of danger. This was the militia system. It may take other forms. The term is loosely applied to the levies of peasants raised by sedentary states of many kinds, including the Chinese and Russian empires, over long periods of history; it also includes the fyrd of Anglo-Saxon England and its equivalents in continental Europe, which were based on the principle, later known as the jus sequellae or Heerfolge, that free men must bear arms. It had been brought from Germany by the barbarian invaders, was carried on by the kingdoms which succeeded to Roman rule and remained in force until, in the military crises of the ninth and tenth centuries, it was overtaken in importance by the summons (ban) to th
e horse-keeping vassals. In remote regions with weak aristocracies, such as Switzerland and the Tyrol, it survived much longer; indeed, in Switzerland it survives to this day.
Yet it is not with the barbarian but the classical world that we associate the militia idea; with the phalanxes of Greek farmer-citizens who fought each other in their small states’ quarrels, but who might combine against a common danger, such as that offered by the Persian empire in the sixth and fifth centuries BC. It is tempting to imagine that the Germans and the Greeks derived their idea of the freeman’s military duty from a common source, even more tempting to propose that the Greeks’ principal contribution to warmaking — that of the pitched battle, fought on foot at a fixed site until one side or the other conceded defeat — made its way back to the Germans, via Rome, in barbarian times. The evidence, however, may not stand such a weight of supposition. What does seem certain is that Rome, in pre-republican years, imported its tactics from the Greeks and that the Roman army of the Servian Constitution, from which that of the Caesars descended, therefore had its origins in phalanx warfare.22 Politically and culturally thereafter Greece and Rome were to diverge. Rome’s farmer-soldiers would progressively yield place to paid professionals, as it set its course for empire. The Greek ‘genius for discord’ would preserve the individual city militias, thus ensuring that a stronger power, that of the semi-barbarian Macedonians, would eventually do them all down. Nevertheless, as with so much else that was Greek, the militia idea would survive. With the rediscovery of classical learning in Renaissance Europe, it came to seem as good as that of the rule of law or civic pride, with both of which it was of course intimately connected. Machiavelli, whose political thought was rooted in the perception that sovereignty derives from arms, did not merely write books on the subject; he actually drafted the Florentine militia law (the Ordinanza of 1505) which was intended to liberate his city from the mercenary scourge.23
There was, however, a military defect in the militia system. Because it laid duty on the property-owning alone, it thereby limited the number of men a state could put into the field to a number lower than that of all its able-bodied male residents. The Greeks accepted that limitation for two reasons; the first was that it solved the besetting problem of how to pay for the army, since the soldiers in effect paid for themselves; the second was that it ensured the army’s reliability: the property test united those who passed it, whatever their political differences, against all who did not, the landless and the enslaved, who as non-citizens were not allowed to bear arms. When emergency struck, however, such élitism could prove a crippling disadvantage, as the Spartans — who took to extremes the principle of exclusivity — found in the war with Thebes in the fourth century BC.
Conscription is not exclusive; by definition, it includes all who can march and fight, irrespective of wealth or political rights. For that reason it has never recommended itself to regimes which feared armed subjects might take power, nor to those which found difficulty in raising funds. Conscription is for rich states which offer rights — or at least the appearance of rights — to all. The first state to meet those conditions in full was the First French Republic. Some others — Frederick the Great’s Prussia, for example — had imposed something like conscription before, but it had worked only by using the regular part of the army to recruit the rest. In August 1793, the French Republic declared that until the moment ‘when enemies have been driven from the Republic’s territory, all Frenchmen are permanently requisitioned for the service of the armies’; a former property test, which limited duty only to ‘active citizens’, had already been abolished.24 Henceforth all Frenchmen might be soldiers and by September 1794 the Republic had 1,169,000 under arms, a size of force never before seen in Europe.
The whirlwind successes of the Revolutionary armies designated conscription as the military system of the future; they were, after all, what prompted Clausewitz to argue that ‘war was the continuation of politics’; the grave drawbacks of the system — that it militarised society and entailed enormous costs — went unforeseen or were disguised. The Revolutionary armies paid for themselves for long periods by loot (Bonaparte’s Army of Italy, at the time when the Republic’s paper notes had driven coin out of circulation, became its principal source of hard currency); the other European governments that adopted conscription from the mid-nineteenth century onward concealed from themselves the financial burden by paying conscripts less than pocket money.
It is in that sense that conscription may be seen as a form of tax. Like all taxes, however, it had ultimately to make a beneficial return to those who paid. In France the benefit was citizenship for all who served. The monarchical governments that adopted it during the nineteenth century could not concede that weakening of their power. They offered the exhilarations of nationalism as a substitute, in the German states with great success. Nevertheless, the French idea that only the armed man enjoyed full citizenship had taken root, and rapidly became transmuted into the belief that civic freedoms were both the right and the mark of those who bore arms. Thus in some states where civic freedoms were already enjoyed but conscription was not imposed, such as Britain and the United States, there arose in mid-century the odd phenomenon of citizens foisting themselves on governments as volunteer soldiers; and in those struggling to resist the growth of representative institutions while imposing conscription, particularly Prussia, the middle-class militias brought into being by the wars against Napoleon sought to survive as outposts of rights against the powers of the king and his regular army.
In the long run, the establishment of universal conscription in the advanced states of continental Europe was matched by the extension of the vote, though for parliaments generally less responsible than those of the Anglo-Saxon countries, and by processes that had no direct and visible connection. The result, however, was that, at the outbreak of the First World War, Europe was composed of states in most of which some form of representative institutions existed and all of which maintained large conscripted armies. The loyalty of such armies, headily reinforced by national feeling, was to hold up throughout the first three years of the war’s terrible ordeal. By 1917, the costs, psychological as well as material, of making every man a soldier began to have their inevitable effects. There was a large-scale mutiny in the French army in the spring of that year; in the autumn the Russian army collapsed altogether. In the following year the German army went the same way; at the November armistice, on its return home, the army demobilised itself and the German empire was thrown into revolution. It was the almost cyclical outcome of a process begun 125 years earlier, when the French had rescued a revolution by appealing to all citizens to support it with arms. Politics had become the extension of war and the age-old dilemma of states — of how to maintain efficient armies that were both affordable and reliable — had revealed itself to be as far from solution as when Sumer had first laid out its revenues to pay for soldiers.
4
Iron
STONE, BRONZE AND THE horse — the principal means through which war was waged in the era when states were being established and when they were being assaulted by warrior peoples living beyond the settled zone — were by nature limited resources, though in different ways. Stone is laborious to fashion. Bronze is a product of scarce metals. The horse can be kept, in the numbers necessary to mount a fighting army, on grazing lands that are found only in restricted areas of the world. Had stone, bronze and the horse remained the means by which war was fought, its scope and intensity might never have exceeded the levels experienced during the first millennium BC, and human societies, except in the confined and benevolent conditions that prevailed in the great river valleys, might never have evolved far beyond pastoralism and primitive husbandry. Man needed some other resource with which to attack the face of earth in the temperate, forested zones but also to contest possession of the lands already settled with the rich and strong minorities which had monopolised the expensive technology of warmaking in the Bronze Age.
