Warfare was a dominant feature of medieval German history. After the late fourth century, Germanic tribes penetrated the western Roman Empire in force, bringing important changes to the military system. Roman discipline and organization gave way to badly organized forces with poor training, few arms, and almost no discipline. Military recruitment and payment for services were based on the amount of booty a leader could provide his soldiers, and loyalty to this leader was dependent on the continued success of his conquest. Soldiers generally were equipped with only a rudimentary shield and helmet, and their arms consisted of a sword, ax, or spear. These militaristic barbarians had an almost Homeric sense of heroism and revered martial skills. Their names, both male and female, reflected the constant presence of war, and warriors were the elite of the wergeld (literally, man money) system of compensation and given elaborate burials with their equipment and booty.
By the sixth and seventh centuries, the Merovingian Franks, who required military service of all free men, had an effective army based on infantry. Their special weapon was the francisca, a throwing ax. They adopted body armor only gradually. With this army, they conquered most of the land of what would become Germany. They protected their lands with fortifications, which, other than those inherited from the Roman Empire, were simple earth and wood ramparts.
When the Carolingians came to power in the eighth century, the requirements of a large empire led to new military institutions that presaged the military obligation patterns of a later time. Rulers granted income-producing estates to followers who promised to render full-time military service at their own expense. The expanding role of the stirrup gradually encouraged the development of heavy cavalry and eventually the archetypical medieval knight.
The system of land grants and oaths of loyalty enabled Charlemagne to muster an effective cavalry force almost annually. His armies were not large, but they were powerful and dominated their opponents. He generally led them himself, and although there were few “formal” military tactics, they were successful in most engagements and in adding much new land to his empire. Among these lands were Saxony and Lombard Italy.
As the ruins of the Carolingian Empire gave way to Ottonian, Salian, and eventually Hohenstaufen Germany, rulers stayed in power largely by dint of their military capabilities, and some suffered serious political reversals when defeated in war. Recruitment of soldiers increasingly depended on administrative institutions of obligation in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and emperors and other nobles sometimes could not muster sufficient troops to fight their wars. As they began to acquire more resources, they began to supplement traditionally recruited troops with paid professionals.
Mounted soldiers were still the core of the army with improved weapons and armor and mounted on expensive warhorses, they usually decided the course of each battle, fighting with couched lance in a tournament-like fashion. Most cavalry soldiers of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were knights supported by fiefs. Large battles were infrequent, and those that were fought often included only rudimentary tactical combinations.
While the cavalry was the core of the army, the most numerous forces were still the infantry. Levied from among the freemen of the kingdom, these troops were armed much less well than their mounted counterparts. While some were protected by a helmet, a small shield, and a leather hauberk, infantry soldiers frequently served without armor. Offensive infantry weapons included the spear, sword, lance, and pike, with little standardization among these weapons. Archers also served in infantry contingents, initially being equipped with traditional wood bows. In the course of the twelfth century, these began to be replaced with the more powerful crossbow.
Following the Carolingian period, the siege replaced the battle as the primary form of military engagement. Though Charlemagne had effectively altered the standard of battlefield fighting, he and his successors tended to neglect fortifications, leaving the empire vulnerable to the raids of Vikings and, especially in Germany, Hungarians. In the eleventh century, local rulers led in the construction of fortifications, at first small earth and wood castles, but soon larger and stronger structures of masonry. These more intricate and costly fortifications provided valuable defenses. Although mining, sapping, and stone-throwing engines were used against them, a castle or town with strong stone walls could generally be reduced only by starvation.
In the late Middle Ages, five significant developments altered warfare. First, armies fighting on foot began again to predominate. The stunning defeats of German cavalry armies at Mortgarten in 1316 and Vottem in 1346 were followed by several others in the Holy Roman Empire over the next two centuries. The second development was the continual fighting that beset Germany between the early thirteenth and sixteenth centuries. This long military struggle exhausted the German military and eventually required a stricter and often less noble military bureaucracy, which would not be fully achieved until the reign of Emperor Charles V. As well, the emergence of condottieri, paid mercenaries without traditional military obligation, weakened medieval military institutions. The third factor was the Black Death of 1348-1349, which significantly reduced the numbers available to fight on the battlefield and defend German towns and castles. The fourth was the advent of frequent and often violent popular rebellions by German peasants, townspeople, and nobles, the suppression of which required changes in military tactics.
Finally, warfare was changed by the advent and proliferation of missile weapons employing gunpowder. Appearing initially in the early fourteenth century, they began influencing warfare by the 1380s, when they were used effectively against fortifications and on the battlefield. By 1400, no siege was free of their use, as they reduced substantially the time needed to destroy walls. No longer was it necessary to rely on starvation to force the capitulation of castles or towns. By the 1430s, hand-held gunpowder weapons began to take their place among infantry contingents, changing the face of battlefield engagements. By the Swiss and Burgundian Wars of 1475-1477, one third of the infantry on each side was outfitted with handguns. These late medieval changes brought an end to medieval forms of warfare and encouraged the development of states capable of financing modern armies.
BIBLIOGRAPHY Contamine, Philippe. War in the Middle Ages, trans. M. Jones. London: Blackwell, 1984. DeVries, Kelly. Medieval Military Technology. Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview, 1992. Lot, Ferdinand. L’Art militaire et les armées au moyen Age, 2 vols. Paris: Payot, 1946. Oman, Sir Charles. A History of the Art of War in the Middle Ages, 2d ed. 2 vols. London: Methuen, 1924. Verbruggen, J. F. The Art of Warfare in Western Europe During the Middle Ages: From the Eighth Century to 1340, trans. S. Willard and S. C. M. Southern, 2d ed. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1997.
