Early Carolingian Warfare: Prelude to Empire (review)

164 Reviews Parergon 20.2 (2003) Bachrach, Bernard S., Early Carolingian Warfare: Prelude to Empire (The Middle Ages Series), Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001; cloth; pp. xii, 430; 1 map; RRP US$55.00; ISBN 0812235339. This lengthy study is intended as a corrective to the general bearing of recent work in Carolingian studies towards intellectual and spiritual history. For all its cultural achievements, the Carolingian empire, like its Roman forebear and its imitators, was founded on vast military resources. Its armies regularly overcame those of neighbouring states during the late seventh and eighth centuries, the period of Carolingian expansionism discussed here. Bachrach sets this hard fact at the outset of his study as the sine qua non of the Carolingian state, and chides historians for their squeamish disinterest in this defining feature of medieval imperialism. Bachrach is an established US historian of Merovingian and Carolingian France, with an impressive bibliography of work on early medieval warfare (cf. his Variorum volume, Armies and Politics in the Early Medieval West [1993]). Though his topic may appear to be of more interest to military historians than to medievalists in general, it has important broader ramifications for our understanding of the early medieval West. The first of the book’s six chapters is the most controversial, arguing that Carolingian expansionism was the result of a premeditated, long-term strategy to regain and extend the vast territory formerly ruled by the early Frankish kings in the sixth century. The remaining five chapters examine practical issues: military organisation (the raising and maintenance of professional and nonprofessional troops, including financing); training and equipment; morale (based on the stomach, the spirit, and commanders’ reputations); battlefield tactics; and campaign strategy. Treatment of each topic is thematic, with narrative accounts of some individual campaigns presented as illustrations of the points discussed. The discussion is commendably clear and sufficiently non-technical for nonspecialists to follow with ease. Bachrach exemplifies that broad swing of early medieval studies in the twentieth century towards a rationalistic perception of the period, looking for roots of European history in the documented Roman past rather than in a reconstructed ‘Germanic’ antiquity. So, for Bachrach, Carolingian military success is the result of technology, tactics, and training on the one hand; and on the other, of structures of government administration designed to support military activity. Policies and structures of the Frankish armies are compared Reviews 165 Parergon 20.2 (2003) unashamedly with those of the Roman empire, early and late, and sometimes understood as direct continuities or restorations of Roman practices. Older scholarship on the subject, too, looks for continuities, but the difference in whence continuity is assumed to stem is vast. An instructive comparison may be made with the summary of ‘Social and Military Institutions’ in the recent Carolingian volume of the New Cambridge Medieval History, vol. 2 (1995) (pp. 471-73), on the subject of the constitution of military followings. There, the Carolingian army is still seen as an extension of a ‘proto-feudal’ Germanic and Scandinavian tradition of warrior retinues, called the comitatus by Tacitus and the Gefolgschafte by twentieth-century Germanists (both names commonly and falsely used in modern discussions as if they were indigenous Germanic terms); each retinue was bound by sworn oaths of fidelity to its commander, whose authority stemmed primarily from his own charisma. By contrast with this Romantic construct, Bachrach, in speaking of military followings, discusses terms used by the sources, in particular obsequia, ‘military households’ of professional soldiers maintained by wealthy individuals or institutions: lay aristocrats, ecclesiastical magnates, and the royal court itself. Obsequia were in effect private armies, maintained explicitly at the command of the Carolingian government in order to provide military resources from which the kings could draw to form the core of any military force (supplemented by non-professional levies). Bachrach points to the private armies of late Roman magnates, such as Justinian’s general Belisarius, as the precursors of Carolingian obsequia. Roman imperial legislation is taken as the model for the incorporation of these private forces into imperial military resources, and early medieval redactions of the Theodosian Code are cited as a vehicle by which late Roman technical expertise on the financing of military...