War: What is it good for? (23 page)

Between
A.D.
200 and 1400 that ceased to be the case. The power of the steppe horsemen was simply too great. One king or another might thrust back the forces of chaos, but none could permanently stop the steppe migrations. Sooner or later, the roving bandits would be back, and until someone learned how to stop them, Eurasia's lucky latitudes could not break the bloody cycle of productive and counterproductive wars.

The Counterrevolution in Military Affairs

Counterproductive wars threw all the developments described in
Chapters 1
and
2
into reverse. Overwhelmed by enemies, governments failed in their basic duty of providing security. Traders stayed home, with disastrous consequences for the kings who taxed them and for the people who needed their goods. With rulers unable to pay their armies, troops made up the shortfall by plundering the peasants, and the peasants sought safety under the protection of great landlords. These worthies organized the increasingly subservient villagers into militias to fight off invaders and tax collectors and generally saw little reason to pay anything to distant monarchs.

The productive wars of the last five millennia
B.C.
had driven a string of revolutions in military affairs that converted disorganized rabbles into disciplined, well-led legions, but counterproductive wars now set off what we can only call a counterrevolution in military affairs. Kings, generals, and foot soldiers did not forget the advantages of mass, discipline, and regular meals—after all, what has once been invented cannot simply be uninvented—but as Eurasia's Leviathans lost their teeth, governments stopped being able to pay for these fine things.

Armies shrank, navies rotted, supply chains broke down, and command and control collapsed. Back in the eighth century
B.C.
, Tiglath-Pileser III of Assyria had made his mark by cutting the aristocracy out of war, raising (and paying) armies loyal to him alone. A thousand years on, kings started doing exactly the opposite. Unable to squeeze the money for armies out of their wayward barons, they instead started cutting deals with them.

In the old days, kings and landlords had both taken bites from the meager incomes of their peasants, with monarchs calling their share taxes and local bosses calling theirs rent. Finding themselves too weak to collect taxes, kings now gave up their claims and handed out grandiose titles and privileges to every thug with his own armed gang. In return for leaving the aristocracy to run their estates like mini-kingdoms, the crown extracted promises that its earls, counts, and barons would turn up whenever the
monarch wanted to go to war, bringing with them troops raised from their own fiefdoms.

The easiest way for noblemen to find these soldiers was by repeating the kings' strategy, passing some of their lands and laborers on to lesser knights in return for more promises to show up and fight. These knights, in turn, passed lands and laborers to still lesser personages, and so on, until webs of rights and duties bound together everyone from the king in his castle to the poor peasants who actually did the work.

For kings slithering down the slopes of counterproductive war, these arrangements had an obvious advantage: the throne no longer had to pay professional soldiers to fight or bureaucrats to raise taxes. However, organizing armies this way also had disadvantages. The first was that kings now had little leverage over their followers, who often cared more about their own fame and glory than about any larger plan, tending to plunge into battle (or to run away) as the mood took them. The most famous of all medieval battles, at Hastings in 1066, turned on just this issue. At the critical moment, the Normans attacking the right wing of King Harold's Anglo-Saxon army turned tail and ran. Forgetting orders, doctrine, and common sense, Harold's brothers Leofwyne and Gyrthe plunged down the hill after them, followed by their cheering men. At the foot of the slope the Normans rallied, turned, and cut down their disorganized pursuers. Its cohesion broken, the Anglo-Saxon line now came apart. The kingdom was lost.

According to legend, King Harold was shot through the eye by a Norman arrow, but even if he had extricated himself from the rout, Harold would have run straight into the second great problem of warfare in this age. Kings who did not win battles did not win plunder either, and despite all the oaths and talk of duty, kings who had no loot to hand out got little loyalty from their men.

The Norman leader William the Conqueror, on the other hand, could now reward his followers by sharing out England's broad acres. Yet even he and his heirs soon ran into difficulties, because the new arrangements created a third problem. As generation succeeded generation, the webs of duty and obligation binding a king and his knights grew increasingly tangled. Clever or lucky lords used inheritance, dowry, and purchase to expand their estates, but each new estate brought new obligations. All too soon, a man would find himself owing allegiance to multiple masters.

Such was the fate of Count Robert II of Flanders. In 1101, Count Robert swore fealty to King Henry I of England, pledging—as was customary—to aid his master “against all men who live and die.” However, Robert added,
that did not include the one man King Henry was actually worried about, King Philip of France. Robert could not promise to fight Philip, because he was already Philip's vassal. Robert assured Henry that if King Philip decided to attack England, he (Robert) would try to talk him (Philip) out of it, but if jaw-j aw failed and Philip went ahead with an invasion, Robert admitted that he would be obliged to fight on the French side—but insisted that he would only send enough troops to avoid looking unfaithful.

If, on the other hand, King Henry of England wanted Count Robert's help in a war that was not against France, Robert would gladly provide it—unless (
a
) Robert was unwell, (
b
) the king of France asked Robert to fight in a different war, or (
c
) the German emperor (who was another of Robert's masters) had also called on Robert. As if this were not complicated enough, Robert's final promise was that if France invaded Normandy—which would almost certainly mean war between France and England—he would send just 20 of his knights to fight on the French side and the other 980 to fight for the English.

This impossible mess of crosscutting allegiances was the outcome of centuries of decline. A few pages ago I mentioned the Byzantine emperor Justinian's attempt to reunite the Mediterranean Basin in the sixth century
A.D.
, but after that failed, Leviathan's breakdown had begun in earnest. Starting in the 630s, Arabs bringing the new faith of Islam infiltrated out of the desert, overwhelming the tiny armies that the Byzantine Empire could now afford. In the 650s, the Arabs overthrew Persia's Sasanid rulers, and for the next half century Byzantium looked as if it were about to go the same way.

By 750, Muslim war parties had triumphed everywhere from Morocco to Pakistan, raiding deep into France and putting Constantinople under siege, but the caliphs never managed to put their Leviathan on a very firm footing. From the earliest days of Islam, caliphs had held an ambiguous position, somewhere between a divinely inspired successor to Muhammad and a conventional king. None really succeeded in converting religious authority into secular rule over more than a small part of his vast empire. By the ninth century many local sultans were effectively independent rulers, fighting each other, the caliph, and anyone else who came along.

Far to the northwest, the Germans who had overrun the western Roman Empire built up new kingdoms, which waged productive war when they had strong kings and counterproductive war when they did not. The most productive of their rulers was the Frankish king Charlemagne, who
conquered much of western and central Europe between 771 and 814. Bureaucrats in the wooden halls of his capital at Aachen bullied local lords, squeezed taxes out of them, promoted literacy, and desperately tried to impose order on the king's subjects. In 800, a thoroughly cowed pope even put a crown on Charlemagne's head and proclaimed him Holy Roman emperor, but the dream of a revived Roman Empire quickly died. The immediate cause was that Charlemagne's son and grandsons got far too busy fighting each other to spare much time for keeping unruly aristocrats in line. “This caused great wars,” a contemporary chronicler lamented, “not because the Franks were lacking princes who were noble, strong, and wise enough to rule their kingdoms, but because they were so equally matched in their generosity, dignity, and power that the discord increased, because no one excelled so much above the others that they would submit to his lordship.”

Even before Charlemagne died, however, new raiders—Vikings coming from the north in longboats and Magyars coming from the east on horseback—had begun plundering the wealth that his productive wars had generated. Aachen was simply too far from the frontiers to respond to these hit-and-run attacks, and in a familiar story local lords stepped in to fill the security void. Not even the great Charlemagne could have held the forces of counterproductive war in check. By 885, when the much-iess-great emperor Charles the Fat conspicuously failed to show up at Paris while Count Odo held off a Viking siege, the empire was effectively a dead letter.

It was every man for himself in this messy new world. The first reference in our sources to a man serving multiple masters in fact comes just a decade after Odo's defense of Paris, but across the centuries that followed, it just got more and more common. By the 1380s, five hundred years after Odo, the problem had become so bad that a French cleric proposed a one-size-fits-all solution. The overcommitted warrior, he recommended, should fight for the first lord to whom he had sworn an oath while discharging his obligations to his second (and third, and fourth, and so on) lord by hiring substitutes to fight instead.

This never caught on, perhaps because substitutes cost money. Much more common was the noble Enguerrand de Coucy's response when his master (the king of England) summoned him to war against his other master (the king of France) in 1369. Coucy declared a personal peace treaty with both kings and, rather than choose one master over the other, found himself a third master, going off to fight in the pope's army in Italy. When
the papal campaigns fizzled out in 1374, Coucy took ten thousand men and waged a private war in Switzerland instead.

In the 1770s, while he was writing
The Wealth of Nations
in the safety of enlightened Edinburgh, Adam Smith contrasted his own well-ordered world with the tumultuous times of Coucy, Count Robert, and Kings Henry and Philip. That era, Smith sadly concluded, had been an age of “feudal anarchy” (so called after
feoda
or
feuda,
the Latin name for the land grants that so entangled everyone's loyalties), when “great lords continued to make war according to their own discretion, almost continually upon one another, and very frequently upon the king; and the open country still continued to be a scene of violence, rapine, and disorder” (
Figure 3.8
).

Since Smith's day, scholars have had a hard time deciding what significance to attach to the age of feudal anarchy. It was reading about medieval mayhem that made Norbert Elias decide in the 1930s that Europe must have subsequently gone through a civilizing process, driving down rates of violent death. But that was only half-correct. Because Elias did not take a long-term perspective, he assumed that feudal anarchy was simply the natural state of humanity, not the end point of a millennium of counterproductive wars that followed the breakdown of the ancient empires.

By the 1960s, though, as the spirit of
Coming of Age in Samoa
convinced more and more academics that humans were naturally peaceful, many historians began to ask whether “feudal anarchy” really was the right way to describe Coucy's world. After all, for every William the Conqueror hacking off heads, there was a Francis of Assisi ministering to the meek, and most of the time Europeans did settle their disputes without resort to force. But so, of course, did most twentieth-century Yanomami—and yet something like one-quarter of their men still died violently. What makes “feudal anarchy” such an appropriate label for fourteenth-century Europe is that many of its residents (much like Yanomami men) turned to violence with shocking casualness.

My own favorite story, out of thousands that survive, is about a knight who dropped in at a neighbor's castle for dinner. “My lord,” he said by way of small talk. “This rich wine, how much did you pay for it?”

“Ah,” his gracious host replied. “No living man ever asked a penny for it.”

It seems to me, in fact, that “feudal anarchy” is an excellent description not just of western Europe between about 900 and 1400 but also of most of Eurasia's lucky latitudes in the same period. From England to Japan, societies staggered toward feudal anarchy as their Leviathans dismembered themselves. In third- and fourth-century northern China, documents speak of the rise of
buqu,
clients who followed warrior-landlords into battle, providing soldiers in return for shares of the plunder. In sixth-century India, rulers of the declining Gupta Empire began recognizing the virtual independence of
samantas,
local lords who provided soldiers when the imperial bureaucracy collapsed. In the ninth-century Middle East, the
iqta
'—lands granted by the caliph to local sultans who might, or might not, raise troops in return—provided what little glue still held the Arab world together. By 1000, the Byzantine Empire had moved in the same direction, with emperors making land grants called
pronoiai
in return for military service. Everywhere, the ancient empires went to their graves.