Barbarians, Marauders, and Infidels: The Ways of Medieval Warfare (review)

I have always found it a good policy to compartmentalize the discussion of grades with my students into the good news and the bad news. The same methodology will serve admirably for the review of this book.

First, for the good news. Antonio Santosuosso's work on the ways of medieval warfare has the advantage of following a very well-marked (some would say, paved) path of academic attempts at explanations of war that stretch back to Clausewitz, Jomini, and Oman. Like so many before him, Santosuosso attempts to discern how war was fought in eras as different as those of the barbarian invasions and the Renaissance. His vantage point for this investigation is hardly novel, following the martial successes and defeats of a pantheon of war leaders ranging from Charlemagne to Joan of Arc. To "get at" the changes that took place in European warfare during the Middle Ages, he focuses on exemplary battles and assesses them from the point of view of strategy, tactics, and logistics. Along with these chronological investigations, he adds topical chapters that focus on artillery, siegecraft, and the place of women in medieval warfare. Except for a few flights of extremely overblown "fine writing," this work is generally well-paced and contains battle descriptions that are both fluid and colorful. This treatise on the waging of war during the medieval centuries is largely based on primary documentation of the era that the author traverses; this is filled out by the inclusion of a great deal of modern scholarship. The book is beautifully produced and contains almost fifty high-quality maps. Because of the many periods it deals with, the work would greatly profit from a list of royal genealogies.

And, now, sadly, for the bad news. The greatest weakness of this book is a fault systemic to the modern discipline of military history at large: the facile explanation of the general structures of warfare through the lens of the individual battle. While this approach has given military history great popularity outside the confines of academia, it drastically simplifies the human experience of warfare and can reduce its study into a kind of over-patriotic antiquarianism.

Another question on the negative side of the ledger that Santosuosso's work brings to mind is one of some importance. Why, with the extremely fine works on medieval warfare that have appeared in the last two decades, would anyone once again venture across this rutted academic landscape? The works of Contamine (1990), Prestwich (1996), and Nicholson (2004) are far better documented and look at medieval warfare from many more vantage points. By contrast, Santosuosso's work is superficial in construction, largely based, as it is, on chronicle evidence and on modern studies that rely on the same type of sources. A far different set of questions and answers would emerge about the medieval way of war, if the author bothered to probe archival sources even in a restricted fashion. In many ways, Santosuousso is trying to find the "right" answer about medieval war in it lowest common denominator. For scholars of military history, this is helpful, but hardly exciting.