By Sword and Fire

by Sean McGlynn

  Artillery consisted of various missile-throwing machines. The mangonel hurled stones on a relatively low trajectory from a wooden arm shaped like a spoon, the wider end holding the projectile. It operated on the torsion principle, the throwing force relying on the release of twisted rope. Another petrary, or stone-throwing machine, was the much larger trebuchet, which came into more common usage by the end of the twelfth century. This consisted of a huge beam pivoted on an axle: at one end was a heavy counterweight and at the other there was a sling to hold a projectile. Sometimes the counterweight force was substituted for traction, a group of men pulling explosively downwards on ropes attached to the beam. The most powerful trebuchets could launch rocks weighing over a tonne, with devastating effects against many walls. They were the heavy artillery of the pre-gunpowder age. In practice, they were used to chuck anything over the walls at the defenders, including dead animals to spread disease, and the severed heads of captured troops, to demoralize the enemy. These were important machines, reflected in the fact they were given names, such as ‘Bad Neighbour’ or ‘Warwolf’. Much controversy and research still surrounds this machine, not least because it is hailed as a medieval innovation, and hence not a device inherited from the wars of antiquity.

  Ballistae – and again we have to be careful of interchangeable terms – were large catapult or crossbow-like weapons. A winch or torsion provided the force from which a heavy bolt or other projectile was shot forward. Unlike the machines above, this was an anti-personnel weapon. A chronicler describing the siege of Paris in 885 implausibly claims that seven men were skewered on one ballista bolt like a spitroast.

  Cannon were operating by the early fourteenth century. The earliest depiction of one is in a manuscript of 1326 presented to Edward III. These developed quickly from a vase-shaped chamber device to the more familiar cylindrical shape. Although used on the battlefield, over time they became mainly employed in siege situations, initially alongside, and eventually replacing, the trebuchet. Working on the not entirely accurate biggest-is-best principle, by the mid-fifteenth century cannon like Mad Margot in Ghent (trebuchet sobriquets were transferred to guns) weighed in at over 36,000 pounds. By the fifteenth century, wealthy princes were employing batteries of cannon of a more standard size against towns and castles. For a while, many defences would not hold against them: the end of the Hundred Years War was marked by a series of swift and successful sieges – some sixty between 1449 and 1450 – in which the French made great use of cannon. However, their impact should not be overestimated: the example from France just mentioned may have been as much due to political reasons as to technological ones. Gradually, military engineers and architects rose to this new challenge, designing new defences that were built to counter cannonade. Sieges could remain protracted affairs. It is also worth remembering that all the weapons described above were also frequently employed by the besieged against their attackers.

  Mining was another dangerous process, but the most effective of all. A tunnel was dug under a castle or town wall, usually directed against the foundations of a tower. When ready, the wooden timbers supporting the roof of the tunnel were burned, thereby bringing down the tower or section of wall. Medieval chronicles and records refer to the purchase of pig fat for this use at sieges. Defenders attempted to detect mines by placing bowls of water on the battlements; disturbances caused by digging could cause ripples, indicating activity underground. The besieged would sometimes then build countermines, occasionally resulting in subterranean combats. Mining, or sapping, was greatly feared by the besieged. When in 1359 the castellan of Cormicy near Reims was shown the English mine excavated under his tower, he promptly surrendered. Betran de Born mocked Philip Augustus for taking his engineers everywhere with him, decrying how unchivalrous it all was; yet Philip was one of the most successful military commanders of the Middle Ages, with a reputation earned almost entirely by his castle-breaking prowess.

  Subterfuge and treachery were other commonly employed methods in taking castles. Louis VIII bribed the English-held port of La Rochelle into submission in 1224. Circa 1342, Bertrand du Guesclin and his men took Fougères from the English by posing as woodcutters bringing firewood. This episode is sometimes related with du Guesclin and his men disguised as women, and in this attire gaining access through the castle gates – one of many underhand stratagems often found in contemporary writings; others include burial parties (with a knight in the coffin with weapons) and using delegations of ecclesiastic peacemakers as a cover for rushing gates.

  Blockade was the most time-consuming technique of all, and one that could match storming for its awful consequences. Sieges that dragged on for months served to exacerbate the grim mood of the besiegers through deprivation, hunger, exposure to the elements, disease, loss of comrades and absence from home. The bitterness and anger pent up in this way were all the more terrible when they were unleashed. Conditions for the besieged were no better; as we shall see, their enforced incarceration brought on untold miseries. An epic and heroic defence of Rochester Castle in Kent in 1215 ended when the defenders’ supplies ran out; having finished off the last of their expensive warhorses for nutrition they were compelled to surrender. Hunger forced Faenza to submit to Frederick II in 1241 after an eight-month siege. As William the Breton observed in the 1220s, ‘Famine alone vanquishes the invincible and by itself can take cities.’3

  Garrisons could attempt to break sieges and blockades by sorties. Mounted soldiers were obviously favoured for this time of action; besieging forces would sensibly have their own cavalry ready to counter such threats. Full-scale sorties could be spectacularly effective, as Simon de Montfort proved at Muret in 1213. Equally, they could go just as spectacularly awry, as happened at Taillebourg in western France in 1179, Richard I’s besieging forces chasing the sortie party back through the town’s open gates. Sorties were also made with the more limited objective of gaining provisions from the besiegers, helping them to hold out for longer.

  The resources expended at a siege operation were always significant and frequently on a scale that was considered draining to the national economy. Michael Prestwich has detailed the huge amounts of materiel that Henry III diverted to the siege of Kenilworth in Warwickshire in 1266: siege engines constructed in the Forest of Dean and a belfry tower from Gloucester; seventy thousand quarrels from London, Lincoln and elsewhere; three hundred sheaves of arrow from Surrey and Sussex; fourteen carts to transport wine; and, amidst many other items, even a whale to provide meat. ‘In all, the requisitions of materials and foodstuffs to support the siege exhausted the revenues of ten counties, whose sheriffs were unable to bring in any cash to the exchequer in 1267.’4 In Henry’s long reign, this proved to be his second-worst financial year. Such a concentration of effort (sustained in this case over six months), could leave the besiegers thirsting for retribution if the siege was successfully concluded. Such was the exhaustion of both sides at Kenilworth, the garrison were extremely fortunate to be permitted to come to terms and escaped very lightly.

  It was not uncommon for sieges to take on epic proportions like Kenilworth. Château Gaillard (1203–4) lasted nearly six months; Crema (1159–60) seven months; Milan (1161–2) ten months; and Montreuil-Bellay (1149–51) some three years. That sieges could be such gruelling marathons is not just an expression of how much could be at stake in the grand political and military strategies of the time; it also reflects the dilemma of the castellan who was caught between a very hard rock and a very hard place. If he held the castle for a lord then his dangers might be doubled: not coming to early terms with the besieger could lead to harsh imprisonment or death should the castle fall; surrendering too easily could leave him exposed to a charge of treason against his lord and hence execution. In 1453 the Duke of Norfolk declared: ‘It hath been seen in many realms and lordships that for the loss of towns or castles without siege, the captains that have lost them have been dead and beheaded, and their goods lost.’5 Charge of a castle or a town was an onerous
personal responsibility, and to surrender it to the enemy without permission (which was commonly given) or without a serious attempt at resistance was a breaking of faith and oath of loyalty. This responsibility was ultimate: in 1356 Lord Greystock was condemned to death because Berwick Castle, commanded by his lieutenant, was taken by the Scots, even though a spirited defence had been mounted; yet at the time Greystock himself was serving the King in France with distinction. (He was pardoned in 1358.) In August 1417, the French garrison at Touques surrendered to Henry V; a leading citizen of the town was later beheaded by the French authorities for this submission, although the Dauphin had not sent assistance (even the messenger was hung for bringing the bad news).

  Control of castles and towns, representations of authority over the land, was the ultimate aim of military strategy. As mentioned in the previous chapter, Orderic Vitalis ascribes the Norman conquest of England to the fact that the English lacked castles: ‘The fortifications that the French call “castles” were very rare in the English regions and hence, although the English were warlike and bold, they were weaker in resisting their enemies.’6 William the Conqueror’s grip on the country became secure only when he planted castles across the landscape. As symbols of power and intent, castles began their military function even before fighting had begun. Emperor Frederick II (the Hohenstaufen ‘stupor mundi’) was typical of wealthy rulers in building to impress. He brought enemy Milanese to see his formidable castle at Foggia in south-eastern Italy with the intention that these should return to Milan and report on Frederick’s awesome power, thereby persuading the city to submit. Truly, castles were, as William of Newburgh very aptly put it, ‘the bones of the kingdom’.7

  STORM, SACK AND NON-COMBATANTS

  In this brief discussion of siege warfare, an obvious but pertinent observation should be made that, for non-belligerents, such combat signified events that were far from the fields of pitched battle where it was only armies that faced and fought each other. Sieges brought the reality of war into people’s very homes. This, and the fact that the line between combatants and non-combatants became blurred during sieges, might have produced more refined laws of war to function alongside the highly developed conventions of siege situations. However, if anything, the laws of war were simplified for sieges, and even brutalized. Whereas a soldier might throw down his weapon in the heat of battle and hope to be taken prisoner, non-combatants on the receiving end of a successful storming could expect to be put to the sword with impunity.

  This aspect of the laws of siege warfare has not been fully addressed by medieval and military historians, who accept that the wholesale slaughter of a resistant population – men, women and children – was considered justified in contemporaries’ eyes on biblical grounds. This justification is said to be found by citing chapter twenty of Deuteronomy, which deals with laws to be observed in war, and verses ten to twenty in particular, which concern the laws governing siege warfare. The confusion arises from verses twelve to fourteen, and verses fifteen to seventeen. The first two, from the King James Version, declare that when an enemy city does not submit, it should be besieged: ‘And when the Lord thy God hath delivered it into thine hands, thou shall smite every male thereof with the edge of the sword; but the women, and the little ones, and the cattle, and all that is in the city, even all the spoil thereof, shalt thou take unto thyself’ (my italics. Deuteronomy 20: 13–14).

  Grounds for total slaughter are lifted from the later verses: ‘But of the cities of these people which the Lord thy God doth give thee for an inheritance, thou shall save alive nothing that breatheth’ (Deuteronomy 20: 16).

  However, the next verse clearly specifies these populations as being the Hittites, Canaanites and other biblical groupings; none of which is relevant to the medieval West. Yet this has been extrapolated to permit the slaughter of rebellious townspeople who have defied their divinely appointed lord and master. In other words, in an extremely attenuated interpretation of these verses, a commander can massacre all and sundry only if they are his subjects, but not, as verse fifteen, makes clear, if the towns belong to another nation, when verse fourteen, sparing women and children, applies. Men and men only are to be slain in ‘the cities which are very far off from thee, which are not the cities of these nations’ (Deuteronomy 20: 15).

  As with the laws applying to battle and prisoners, these injunctions were so selectively and individually employed as to be meaningless on many occasions. That these biblical laws were more likely to be inverted than followed – inhabitants of a city besieged by its lord had a greater chance of survival than inhabitants of a different country facing a foreign enemy – serves once again to highlight the limited application of the laws of war in the Middle Ages, and how they always deferred to the military imperative.

  Jersusalem, 1099

  Few events from the Middle Ages have come to symbolize the carnage that religious extremism engenders as much as the sack of Jerusalem in July 1099. Steven Runciman, the crusades’ most famous historian, judged that ‘the massacre at Jerusalem profoundly impressed all the world’, that it horrified many Christians, and that it ‘was this bloodthirsty proof of Christian fanaticism that created the fanaticism of Islam’.8 H. E. Mayer concurs: ‘The Muslim world was profoundly shocked by this Christian barbarity; it was a long time before the memory of the massacre began to fade.’9 Yet very recent scholarship has questioned the scale of the massacre. Indeed, it is now appropriate to ask whether it was the massacre itself or the fact that it occurred in Jerusalem which was more shocking.

  It was a long road to Jerusalem. In March 1095, Alexius I, the Byzantine emperor, despatched an embassy to Pope Urban II seeking help against the incursions of the Seljuk Turks. The military successes of the Turks had seen them swallow up the greater part of Byzantine territory in the east; they were now directly threatening the imperial capital at Constantinople. Alexius was hoping for professional soldiers; to his great consternation, he received floods of all manner of Europeans inundating his lands, arriving in waves, of whom perhaps only just over ten per cent were knights and nobles. The main force has been calculated as being anything up to sixty thousand strong.

  Before even reaching the Middle East, the crusaders began as they meant to go on, with exhibitions of murderous zealotry. In what was to become a traditional start to any new expedition to the Holy Land, they initiated a series of pogroms against the Jews in Europe, whether en route or not. At Mainz in 1096, one of the largest Jewish communities in Europe was wiped out. Latin and Jewish sources offer terrible testament to events there. Albert of Aachen, in a passage reminiscent of events at Masada in the year CE 73, tells of how the crusaders

  killed the Jews, about seven thousand in number, who in vain resisted the force and attack of so many thousands. They killed the women, also, and with their swords pierced tender children of whatever age and sex. The Jews, seeing that their Christian enemies were attacking them and their children, and that they were sparing no age, likewise fell upon one another, brother, children, wives and sisters, and thus they perished at each other’s hands. Horrible to say, mothers cut the throats of nursing children with knives and stabbed others, preferring them to perish thus at their own hands rather than to be killed by the weapons of the uncircumcised.10

  The justification for such indiscriminate murder was laid at the door of the Jews themselves: as the killers of Christ – ‘His blood be on us, and on our children’ (Matthew 27: 25) – it was all they deserved. However, in Christian theology, mankind was saved by Christ’s death and sacrifice; as the Jews therefore played a role in saving mankind, it was at best unsound theology, but in truth mainly cynical opportunism, to claim that they were the victims of their own actions. Early Christians, laying claim to the Jewish Bible as their own, accused Jews of misinterpreting the scriptures, and of rejecting their own messiah and hence God; The Letter of Barnabas and other Christian writings portrayed Judaism as a false religion created under the influence of an evil angel.


  Religious fervour on the crusade, though manifestly present, was exploited and even largely fabricated as merely a cover for self-interest: the killers of the Jews appropriated their victims’ wealth for themselves, partly to line their own pockets, and partly to finance the expensive business of crusading. That these organized crusading groups stampeded over the Church’s attempts to protect the Jews – at Mainz in western Germany they attacked Bishop Rothard’s hall in which the Jews were sheltering – serves to underline the rapacious greed at the heart of the massacres. As Susan Edington has noted, anti-Semitism ‘was never part of papal policy, nor was it approved by respectable commentators’.11 Which is not to say that there not were plenty of unrespectable commentators glorifying in the slaughter.

  Crusaders had a mixture of motives – booty, land and spiritual needs – that were not easily separated from each other. Recently, historians have tended to stress religious motivations over others; but this should be read more as a redressing of the balance that has previously been weighted too heavily, possibly, towards self-interest. But as we have already adumbrated, religion should be counted as just one part of the combustible admixture that drove the crusaders forward. From the start, all were given an overarching holy goal: the liberation of Jerusalem from four centuries of Muslim rule. As jus ad bellum it provided supreme and unarguably righteous grounds for colonial expansion, all under the guise of an armed pilgrimage that offered the huge incentive of plenary indulgences (an assured place in Heaven) for those that fell along the way. The central importance of Jerusalem to the Christian religion ensured the inclusion on the crusade of the enormous numbers of accompanying non-combatants, or pilgrims. The sources for the First Crusade focus on the gruelling and draining nature of the expedition to the holiest of cities, in which starvation, unbearable thirst and disease proved as potent enemies as the Turks. It took three years of unimaginable hardship, suffering and loss to reach Jerusalem; taking the city was an explosive climax to a phenomenal and bloody quest.