The Last Full Measure (11 page)

Weapons and armor of the nobler class were often decorated in ways that we might think irrational and not germane to their purpose. They could be astonishingly beautiful, and we may find it bizarre or disturbing that things of such decorative intricacy were dedicated to killing and maiming. Other weapons, however, those of the rank-and-file infantry, were emphatically not beautiful at all. The bills, axes, and maces had a lethal functionality not too far removed from the implements of farm and abattoir from which they originated. The pole weapons burgeoned into a whole family of specialized implements with exotic-sounding
names—
guisarme, voulge
, halberd,
fauchard
, glaive,
partizan
(known in Bohemia as the “ear-spoon”),
ravensbill, Rossschinder
(“horse killer”). There were hundreds of variations for each type, reflecting local taste, but the essence was an ax head mounted on a staff (the “pole”), often with numerous hooks and spikes for pulling mounted enemies from their horses (the Mongols of the fourteenth century were particularly adept at unhorsing Christian knights with hooked spears).
²⁰
The point provided a thrusting element; the ax head, a formidable slashing and cleaving element. They were the Swiss Army knife of the medieval infantryman and in the hands of trained soldiers could inflict terrible wounds.

At Morgarten in 1315, one of the bloodiest battles of the medieval period, the Swiss infantry, “slashing and striking with their terrible halberds, shearing through helms,” killed half of the knights of Duke Leopold of Austria’s invading force. Excavated skeletons of knights killed by a halberd show that their skulls were cleft down to the teeth.
²¹
The
Ahlspiess
, a pike with a long square-sectioned blade, was specifically designed to penetrate the joints of a knight’s armor. The point of the halberd could do quite terrible damage to a knight who had been thrown off balance. If he was “struck on the back of his head, or between his shoulders, he would fall forward, exposing the unarmored back of his thighs and backside to the halberdier.”
²²

The upthrust from an infantryman armed with pike or bill or halberd was a serious threat to the mounted knight in two other ways: The belly of his horse was susceptible to a ripping thrust, and the knight’s throat and under-jaw were targets for a piercing upjab. The horse could not be completely encased in armor and be expected to carry a man who, in armor, might easily weigh in excess of 250 pounds. The beast would always be vulnerable to a gutting thrust up through the unprotected belly. In fact the horse, it could be argued, although the defining piece of knightly gear
(the word
chivalry
comes from the French for horse,
cheval
), was one of the most vulnerable parts of the knight’s equipage.

During the 1500s the knight developed, in response to the vulnerability to his throat, an haute-piece—an armored collar that extended from his shoulder. His counterpart in Japan, the mounted samurai, faced exactly the same threat and added a throat protector (
nodowa
). Nevertheless, it was not foolproof protection, as the fourteenth-century historical epic the
Taiheiki
illustrates when an infantryman (in this case a
ohei
or monk-warrior) wielding the halberdlike
naginata
(about 12 feet long) attacks a mounted samurai:

Every threat had to be countered with a defense until, by the end of the medieval era, the knight, once lightly armored in mail hauberk, helmet, and shield, was transformed into a machine of beautiful and all-encasing steel; and although a basic suit of field armor might weigh in the region of 50 pounds, superb craftsmanship gave the knight a surprisingly high degree of maneuverability (it is said that he could vault onto his horse, for example).
²⁴
However, as late as the 1640s, Edmund Ludlow, a royalist cuirassier in the English Civil War, noted that when unhorsed, he “could not without great difficulty recover on horse back again, being loaded with cuirassier arms,” and Sir Edmund Verney flatly refused to go into battle heavily armored, “for it will kill a man to serve in a whole cuirass. I am resolved to use nothing but back, breast, and gauntlet; if I had a Pott [helmet] for the Head that were Pistoll-proofe it maye bee I would use it if it were light.”
²⁵
And he was to pay dearly for his determination, being cut down at the battle of Edgehill in 1642, disdaining even a leather buff coat for protection. On the other hand, the royalist Earl of Northampton was so completely armored that his enemies had to take off his helmet in order to kill him.
²⁶

A knight fighting dismounted, which was common, would have tired easily (the buildup of heat within the suit alone must have been a serious problem), and if struggling on muddy or uneven terrain, he would have put himself at great risk. In comparison, his counterpart in feudal Japan took a very different tack. Where Europeans emphasized size and weight, the samurai opted for lightness and mobility. It is as though the European knight himself became a weapon, dedicated to shock impact. The samurai, on the other hand, considered excessive protection counterproductive.
²⁷
He carried no shield because his
katana
(main sword) was invariably used two-handed, which precluded using a shield in the European style. The weapon dictated a straight-on style of fighting: He stood squarely before his opponent in, for him, a heroically direct confrontation. The type of weapon, the way it was to be used, and the chivalric code that dictated that use all came together. The samurai, however, unlike the knight, saw no disgrace in using standoff weaponry such as the bow. A principal weapon, though, was the
naginata
, used both mounted and on foot. Some evidence suggests that when engaged against a similarly armed mounted samurai it was wielded rather like the
knight’s lance during the tourney, that is, couched under the right arm and angled across the horse’s neck, but more often it would be employed as a slashing weapon with the mounted warrior standing in the stirrups.
²⁸

Although the poleax and the war hammer were often favored by knights, the sword was the trademark weapon of the noble warrior. The swords of the early medieval period were ancestors of the Roman
spatha
, a parallel-edged slashing sword that, with the spread of plate armor in the mid-thirteenth century, developed into a more pointed weapon, adapted as much to thrusting (for penetrating chain mail or piercing the joints of plate armor) as cutting. Even if armor were not pierced (and some modern tests suggest that piercing mail armor with a sword thrust is problematic), a blow from a heavy blade could cause bone fractures and internal injuries.
²⁹
A mounted knight might have a large “war” sword weighing about 5 pounds hung from the front of the saddle, while in his sword belt he would carry a smaller, “arming” sword, weighing about 3 pounds.
³⁰

The transition to plate armor during the thirteenth century was not only a defensive response to pikes but also an attempt to counter the lethality of the very class of weapon the knight held in contempt: the bow and crossbow. Crossbows are known to have been used by Chinese infantry in the fourth century BCE and were used as hunting weapons by the Romans. Their reemergence in Europe during the tenth century seems to have been linked to an upsurge in siege warfare (the Roman siege ballista were essentially huge crossbows), but the Normans took to the crossbow with enthusiasm as an infantry weapon. The advantages to the user were enormous. A knight in whom years of training and a huge amount of money had been invested could be killed by a dolt with a bolt at about 200 yards or less.

The crossbow is a forerunner of machinelike weapons such as
the rifle in that although it was relatively easy to use it was of fairly complex construction, and like all machines, it had its own specialized vocabulary. The bowlike crosspiece (“span” or “lathe”), made of a hardwood such as yew, oak, or maple (though in the Islamic world it might have been made of an amalgam of horn, sinew, and wood), was lashed with whipcord to a stock (“tiller”). The bowstring (“bridle”) was made of whipcord or sinew. To “span” the bow (prepare it for firing), the operator put his foot into the stirrup at the bow end of the tiller and drew back the bridle with muscle power—a hook attached to the crossbowman’s belt and snagged under the bridle pulled it back when the crossbowman straightened up. It might also be pulled back with the aid of a mechanical crank. Once pulled back, the bridle was secured by a catch made of horn. Dartlike bolts (“quarrels”), made most commonly of yew, ash, witch hazel, or poplar and tipped with wicked little heads of a variety of designs depending on the grief they were meant to inflict, were placed in a groove running down the top face of the tiller, engaging with the bridle by a notch (“knock”) at the rear of the bolt. A triggerlike mechanism released the catch, and off flew the bolt—not fired, but “cast,” as though its victim was an unsuspecting fish.

The power of the crossbow, in one way, was considerably more than the longbow’s. It could “draw” about 750 pounds, compared with the longbow’s 70–150 pounds, but its released energy was comparatively inefficient because the span was short and its tips, whose whiplash movement turned stored energy into bolt speed and range, moved through a much shorter trajectory than the long and powerful expanse of the longbow’s. Also, the longbow’s arrow was heavier than a quarrel, which gave it greater penetrative power over a greater distance. To match the longbow’s lethality, the crossbow would have had to be considerably larger, which would have made it impossibly unwieldy. Even in its
comparatively light form it already suffered from a lengthy loading procedure that left the crossbowman vulnerable.

These characteristics molded the tactical use of both types of bow. The crossbow tended to be deployed in relatively close action where the flat trajectory would have a potentially devastating effect (the problem was, of course, that the closer the crossbowman was to the action, the greater his chances of being ridden down or shot down during the relatively lengthy periods of reloading). The longbow, on the other hand, tended to be used at longer distance in arcing trajectories where its high speed of reloading (about twelve shafts per minute, compared with perhaps three per minute for the crossbow—about the same rate as a black-powder musket) could inflict a storm of harm on the enemy.

The famous confrontation between the Genoese mercenary crossbowmen fighting for France and the English and Welsh longbowmen at the battle of Crécy in 1346 is a good illustration. The Genoese were the first to advance within range but without the large shields (
pavise
) behind which they could shelter while reloading. In addition the French approach had been chaotic, and the chronicler Jean Froissart writes that “there fell a great rain,” which almost certainly slackened the crossbow bridles. In contrast, the longbowmen unstrung their bows during the drenching downpour and coiled the linen strings under their helmets for protection. The Genoese got off the first volley and would almost certainly have had to retighten the strings of their crossbows, which increased their risk of being counterattacked. At this point the three thousand or so longbowmen

The hail of arrows—“so thick that it seemed like snow”—took a terrible toll, and the Genoese broke, many only to fall beneath the hooves of the advancing French knights who contemptuously rode down their own crossbowmen in a mad rush to get at the English.

The essential difference between the crossbow and the longbow had as much to do with relative cost as with relative lethality. A longbow, although mechanically simpler than the crossbow, was not necessarily cheaper. It was made from specialized wood, the supply of which presupposed land use dedicated to growing trees rather than more immediately profitable crops. The crossbow, even if made of wood, did not demand the exacting material of the longbow; in fact it could be, and was, made of a composite of materials. But perhaps more important, the crossbow also had a striking economic advantage that would be a preview of the age of the handgun: It did not take the great deal of training, practice, and physical strength to turn out a competent crossbowman that it took to turn out an archer. The long training of an archer was by far the most significant “below-the-line” cost of the bow. It would be the crossbow, unlovely and unloved, rather than the longbow, romantic and revered, that pointed the way to the future and the victory of technology over muscle.