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Battle Seeking:

The Contexts and Limits of Vegetian Strategy

Introduction

Over the last decade or so a consensus has formed about the general shape of medieval strategy.

Although R.C. Smail showed as long ago as 1956 that medieval strategy could be analyzed on its own terms,1

books and articles by Bernard Bachrach, John Gillingham, and others also showed that medieval strategy

could be seen as following many of the fundamental precepts of Vegetius, the late Roman writer on military

affairs.2 Thus, without getting into the question of whether medieval strategy was always or even often self-

consciously Vegetian,3we may take the term Vegetian strategy as convenient shorthand for the general

contours of much medieval strategy.

I shall outline the characteristics of this consensus view more fully in a moment. For now, it sufficesto say that the patterns of Vegetian strategy were based largely in limitations imposed on medieval

commanders by resources, transport technology, and geography. As these same factors constrained

commanders in ancient and classical timesVegetius was, after all, a classical authorVegetian strategy also

characterized much classical warfare. Indeed, because the conditions governing Vegetian strategy arose from

the natural world and human interaction with nature (geography, agricultural productivity and seasonality, and

so on), it is easy to take the patterns of Vegetian strategy as natural. In support of this claim one could

point out the similarities between the strategies advocated by Vegetius and those advocated by Sun-Tzu, the

great Chinese military analyst who wrote a good 600 years before Vegetius.4 To cite only two cases:

1R.C. Smail, Crusading Warfare 1097-1193(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956).

2See, for example, Bernard Bachrach, Fulk Nerra, Neo-Roman Consul (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); John

Gillingham, Richard I and the Science of War in the Middle Ages in War and Government in the Middle Ages, eds. Gillingham and J.C.Holt (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1984) and William the Bastard at War in Studies in Medieval history Presented to R. Allen Brown, eds.Christopher Harper-Bill, Christopher Holdsworth and Janet Nelson, (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1989); P. Flavii Vegeti Renati,Epitoma Rei

Militaris, ed. Alf nnerfors (Stutgart: Teubner, 1995) with selected translation available in Roots of Strategy,ed. T.R. Phillips (Harrisburg,PA: Stackpole Books, 1985).

3As is argued explicitly and consistently by Bachrach: e.g. The Practical Use of Vegetius De Re MilitariDuring the Middle

Ages, The Historian 47 (1985), 239-255; for opposing views cf. Stephen Morillo, Warfare under the Anglo-Norman Kings 1066-1135(Woodbridge: Boydell, 1994), 118, n. 89 and Michael Prestwich, Armies and Warfare in the Middle Ages: The English Experience(NewHaven: Yale University Press, 1996), 186-187.

4Sun Tzu, The Art of War, trans. Samuel B. Griffith (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1963). The similarities are most

striking in precisely those areas most universally conditioned by the natural and agricultural constraints of the pre-modern world. Sun

Tzu does not, of course, anticipate the specific organization and training of the Roman legion in Vegetius (though both stress

organization and discipline), but then medieval commanders had no use for those sections of Vegetius either, sections whose utility

did not become apparent until John and Maurice of Nassau, whose governments abilities to raise and train troops in the Romanmanner far exceeded any medieval governments.


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Vegetius: The main and principle point in war is to secure plenty of provisions and

destroy the enemy by famine.

Sun Tzu: Hence the wise general sees to it that his troops feed on the enemy, for

one bushel of the enemys provisions is equivalent to twenty of his; one

hundredweight of enemy fodder to twenty hundredweight of his.

Vegetius: Good officers decline general engagements where the danger is common,

and prefer the employment of strategem and finesse to destroy the enemy as much

as possible in detail and intimidate them without exposing our own forces.

Sun Tzu: Thus, those skilled in war subdue the enemys army without battle.5

That European warfare continued to follow Vegetian patterns well into the 18thcentury further supports the

apparent naturalness of Vegetian strategy.6

I will not argue with Cliff Rogers emendation of the usual formulation of Vegetian warfare

elsewhere in this issue: the Vegetian avoidance of battle has been overstated.7 But Vegetian patterns that

were still somewhat battle averse, especially on the defensive,8evidently remain a correct description of much

medieval warfare. But in important ways Rogers criticism of the Vegetian paradigm does not go far enough.

What I propose to do is to examine the contexts and limits of Vegetian strategy, for if the history of human

culture teaches us anything, it is that what seems most natural is often highly constructed, socially and

culturally. Some of the contexts and limits I shall examine may be obvious, but some arent, and we need

reminding, I think, of all of them because classical and medieval sciences of war, as Vegetian strategy has

often come to be called in the new consensus, are also cultures of war. Recognizing this is important, for

while the consensus view describes much medieval warfare, it does not describe it all, and exceptions to such

a natural pattern would seem to call for explanation. This paper will sketch the outline of a general theory

of pre-modern strategy, and attempt to place Vegetian patterns within that more general analysis.

5Vegetius in Roots of Strategy, 128, 143; Sun Tzu II.15 (p. 74), III.10 (p. 79).

6See, for example, Martin van Creveld, Supplying War : Logistics from Wallenstein to Patton(Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1977); Christopher Duffy, The Fortress in the Age of Vauban and Frederick the Great 1660-1789(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,

1985).

7

Cliff Rogers, The Vegetian Science of Warfare in the Middle Ages, above, [pages xx -xx]. I want to thank Cliff forgenerously allowing me access to several drafts of his paper . I hope we have both benefited from exchanges which are reflected inour respective footnotes. See below, [page xx], for further comments on Rogers criticisms of the Vegetian paradigm in medieval

historiography. See also the perceptive comments of John France, Western Warfare in the Age of the Crusades, 1000-1300(Ithaca: Cornell

University Press, 1999), 150-151, who notes the lure of decisiveness and the contexts of conquest and civil war as encouraging

generals to risk battle, though he does not fully explain why these contexts promote battle seeking. My own formulations of the

Vegetian paradigm do recognize a place for battle in a generals tool kit; see Morillo, Warfare under the Anglo-Norman Kings, passim.

8Rogers, Vegetian Science of Warfare, [page xx]: the side which could win by simply relying on the Vegetian strategyof harassment and defense behind fortifications would often choose to do so.


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Vegetian Strategy

The major strategic principles embodied in what is called Vegetian strategy are logistical. Above all,

they reflect the limited productivity of traditional agriculture and the seasonal patterns of both that agriculture

and the availability of wild fodder for horses. Vegetius advises commanders to live, as far as possible, off the

enemys land.9 Offensive campaigns should seek to support themselves by foraging and pillaging in enemy

territory, activities which not only supply ones own forces but deny the opponents own resources to him. If

carried out widely and often enough, the devastation directly undermines the enemy forces economic

capacity for continued resistance, and threatens the political coherence of enemy territory by exposing the

inability of its leaders to protect its constituent parts.

What is the defense to do in reply? One indirect response is to launch ones own attack into the

territory of the raiders, hoping to draw them back into defense of their own land. More direct responses

include shadowing the invading army closely enough as to prevent their foraging. Short of supplies and

frustrated by a lack of booty from plundering, the invaders, it is hoped, go home. But ultimately, Vegetian

strategy assumes the centrality of fortifications in the defense of territory. Even if raiders pillage their way

through some of your land, if you keep your hold on the forts you keep your hold on the land and people and

live to fight again another day. Thus, the second major activity attackers engage in is besieging fortifications.

This again often resolves into a logistical battle. Can the besieging army keep itself supplied longer than the

besieged strongpoint can? If the defenders can keep an army in the field in addition to a garrison in the fort,

this army might again stay close enough to the besiegers to hamper their foraging and so drive them off.

Given a vital fortification, a determined and well-supplied besieger, and a determined relief army, a

battle might result. But a final feature of Vegetian strategy, and the one that earned it the opprobrium of

armchair generals weaned on Clausewitz, is its somewhat limited use of battle as a tool in warfare.10 Battle, in

the contexts Vegetian strategy assumes, was often an indirect path to goals more directly reached by pillaging

and sieges. Furthermore, it was a risky option: the vagaries of chance could steal from a superior force in one

day what it had worked weeks or months to obtain. Though an attacking force, especially, might seek battle

for strategic reasons, such battle seeking was closely constrained by considerations of topography, tactical

systems, relative force, and so on; on the defensive, only dire necessity constituted a good reason for actively

seeking battle without overwhelming advantages of terrain (including fortifications) or force.11.

9Vegetius in Roots of Strategy,I, 128.

10E.g. Charles Oman, History of the Art of War in the Middle Ages(1924), 2:201.

11Cf. Rogers, Vegetian Science of Warfare, [page xx].


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Logistical warfare; a central role for fortifications; a resulting paucity of battles: Vegetian strategy in a

nutshell. Again, as long as we avoid the question of intentionalitythat is, of whether Vegetius was the explicit

teacher of such patterns to medieval commanders it is widely agreed that this pattern describes much

western medieval warfare, ranging from the career of William the Conqueror to many campaigns of the 100

Years War, from Fulk Nerras Anjou to the Syrian frontiers of the Crusader States. As a quick reading of

On Skirmishing Warfare shows, Byzantine defensive strategy from the seventh to the mid -tenth century

was certainly Vegetian, as ambush, trickery, denial of supplies and counter-raids all precede offering battle in

defense of Byzantine territory. As the Byzantine author notes, When the situation is such that they cannot

confront the enemy directly, they may employ this method, and they will preserve both themselves and their

country from harm.12 Much Islamic warfare, especially against the Byzantines and the Crusader States,

conformed to this pattern, as did the warfare of many of Byzantiums other neighbors and its successor in the

area the Ottomans.13 Apparent exceptions, such as Saladins battle seekingstrategy of the 1180s or EdwardIIIs campaigns in France,14appear on closer analysis to be the result of force disparities and other special

circumstances that made battle seeking sensible at least for one side in a basically Vegetian context. Looking

even more broadly, most Chinese warfare, whether on the frontiers or internally, also followed Vegetian

patterns (though a Sino-centrist might wish to call this Sun-tzu-ian strategy).15

Given Rogers criticisms of the Vegetian paradigm for describing medieval warfare, however, several

further comments concerning some of his points may be necessary, though his general point that the place of

battle in the paradigm has been unduly de-emphasized is certainly correct, as noted above.16 First, the place

of battle in the paradigm. Rogers claims to find a logical flaw in the theory, in that if, as Vegetius advises,

12Skirmishing in Three Byzantine Military Treatises,ed. G.T. Dennis, 137-239, quote on 147; see also Mark Whittow, TheMaking of Byzantium, 600-1025 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 175-181.

13Whittow, Ch. 8 and 327-335; Patricia Crone, The Early Islamic World in Kurt Raaflaub and Nathan Rosenstein, eds.,War and Society in the Ancient and Medieval Worlds: Asia, The Mediterranean, Europe, and Mesoamerica (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University

Press, 1999), 309-332; Rhoades Murphey, Ottoman Warfare 1500-1700(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999).

14 Cliff Rogers, War Cruel and Sharp (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2001), makes a convincing case for Edwards battleseeking as a central component of his strategy in France. See below, [page], for further analysis of Edward IIIs campaigns.

15Thomas Barfield, The Perilous Frontier (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992); Edward L. Dreyer, Early Ming China: A Political History,

1355-1435(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1982).16And his corollary, that the role of infantry has been overemphasized, is also on target. Rogers notes the important

tactical and operational roles mounted troops played (Rogers, Vegetian Science of Warfare, [page xx]). The central problem withanalyzing the roles of infantry and cavalry in medieval warfare, however, lies not in tactical or operational factors, but in the

intersection of such factors with social structure, an intersection often obscured by our terminology for troop types which almost

unconsciously imposes modern categories inappropriately on medieval data. See Morillo: Milites, Knights and Samurai: MilitaryTerminology, Comparative History, and the Problem of Translation, in Richard Abels and Bernard Bachrach, eds., The Normans andTheir Adversaries at War. Essays in Memory of C. Warren Hollister (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2001). In short, it is not the role of cavalry

but the role of a knightly military elite who usually rode horses that is underplayed by an undue emphasis on the role of men on foot.


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one should do whatever ones enemy wishes one not to do, and ones enemy wishes to avoid battle, then

one should seek battle.17 This criticism confuses, I believe, ends and means. Yes, there will be times when

this logic holds true, but there will also be times when Vegetius injunction applies to larger strategic goals,

towards which battle is only a tool. In such cases, one could conceivably not seek battle and still be doing

what a similarly battle shy defender would not want one to do. My enemy wishes me not to besiege crucial

town X. I move to besiege town X. He wishes to drive me off, and so threatens one of my castles. Perhaps

I then retreat to defend my own castle; perhaps this operational dance results in an exchange of castles, as in

1094 when William Rufus moved against Robert Curthoses stronghold at Bures. Robert responded by

moving against Williams garrison at Argentan, and both places changed hands.18 In these and other cases,

battle need not enter the equation, and yet each of us is trying to do what the other wishes us not to do.

Second, the theory of Vegetian warfare, at least as I have written about it, recognizes a place for

battles in the conduct of campaigns. Yes, I characterize it as a risky last resort, and so the conduct even of

battle seeking generals proves it to be: before engaging in battle, such generals tried other means to secure

their ends, and tried to secure every advantage of terrain, weather and numbers before entering into combat.

And yet, certainly, battle was an option, a tool in the generals toolkit. It was often closely associated with

sieges, in which activity attackers engaged more frequently, I think, than battle-seeking.19 As I wrote in

Warfare under the Anglo-Norman Kings,if an enemy were in the process of attacking the realm, and in particular

if it were threatening or actually besieging a friendly stronghold, the field forces moving to oppose them had

three courses of action available to them to lift the siege: threaten or disrupt the besiegers supplies, threaten

him with battle, or bring him to battle.20 In other words, sometimes battle was a normal part of the

medieval generals repertoire.

And note that second option: threatening battle. Many of Rogers examples can be interpreted not as

battle seeking behavior but as battle threatening behavior. Now if one is fairly certain that ones enemy will

refuse battle on the terms offered, threatening battle can in fact be part of battle avoiding behavior. And if,

by chance, stupidity, or miscalculation ones enemy accepts on ones own terms, then the risky last resort has

become worth the risk. In other words, seeking battle only when one has the advantage of terrain,

17Rogers, Vegetian Science of Warfare, [page].

18Henry of Huntingdon, Historia Anglorum, ed. T. Arnold (Rolls Series, 1879), 217.

19 This is one point on which a simple empirical investigation might prove worthwhile but has not systematically been

undertaken.

20Morillo, Warfare under the Anglo-Norman Kings,106. Rogers, Vegetian Science of Warfare, n. 19, is correct that ravaging(or undertaking a siege, which he doesnt mention) couldin fact be a means of provoking ones foe into a battle on ones own terms.


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topography, weather, or numbers preferably all of the above plus any others, such as better morale or a

superior tactical system (such as Edward III employed), one can muster is a perfectly comprehensible

corollary of the principles of Vegetian warfare.

What about the advantages of battle that Cliff points out, that battles put people and cities under

subjection to you?21 Well, of course they could. Let me quote myself again.

Field forces could take hostile castles and cities in several ways. Perhaps the

most effective way was to come into the field unopposed by enemy field forces.

This carried the threat to the strongholds of a siege without hope of relief or

distraction of the attacker, a situation properly construed as hopeless in most cases.

How did armies achieve unopposed occupation of the field of war? often, if the

field of war were to be possessed alone, enemy armies had to be defeated in

battle.22

Two points to stress here. First, the advantage of clearing the field by battle works only if ones siege

techniques are up to the job of exploiting the advantage. I assumed this in the context of Anglo-Norman

warfare, but the difference between the post-battle strategies of Edward III and Henry V illustrate the

difference this factor can make.23 Second, this was a high risk, high gain strategy, and many commanders

were, rightly or wrongly, averse to taking the risk, preferring a slower, less risky but also possibly less

rewarding path. William I, except at Hastings, generally preferred to move directly against enemy

strongholds. In fact, he sometimes managed to achieve the same result as a successful battle would have

given him simply through sheer speed of action, as when he invaded Maine in 1073, appearing in the field so

rapidly that no enemy field force opposed him and the countys castles rapidly surrendered to him.24 But

someincluding of course William at Hastings were willing to take the risks, for as Rogers notes, battle

could well be as decisive in the Middle Ages as in other periods.25 But of course, the decisiveness of

medieval battle is not really at issue,26and only proves the riskiness of it.

Now what about that riskiness? Does the admission that battle could be decisive undermine

Gillinghams claimthat battle could be unprofitable for the winner and disastrous for the loser?27 Well, yes,


22Morillo, Warfare under the Anglo-Norman Kings,103.

23Though the differences between the two kings war aims also played a part in this divergence.

24OV, 2: 306-08.


26At least between Rogers and myself, as we agree that it was a potentially decisive element of medieval warfare.

27Rogers, Vegeetian Science of Warfare, [page].


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in some cases. Again, it depended on how the battle was decisive, how decisive it was, and whether the

winners had the means to exploit the victory. But it is not logically impossible, as Rogers claims, for both

conditions to hold. I fight a battle to drive off an invader who has already ravaged much of my land. I win,

and kill the opposing leader in the process. But the effort leaves me unable to exploit my victory. I have lost

revenue from the ravaging; I have perhaps lost the loyalty of some of my followers, who go unrewarded for a

hard campaign and may have seen their own lands ravaged; in short, I have not profited from the battle,

except to limit further losses. And yet the battle has been a disaster for the invaders, the survivors of whom

go home leaderless and in turmoil. It is especially a disaster for the dead leader, who may thereby have

endangered his dynastic line even if his kingdom survives. Or another, concrete example. The English not

only win at Poitiers, they capture King John of France: A disaster for the French. Yet the French do not lose

the war, and the English attempts to exploit the victory draw them into an unprofitable occupation of

territory and a period of expensive stasis following the Treaty of Bretigny.28 There is, in short, nothing

inherently illogical about the theory of battle avoidance as a central feature of Vegetian warfare, though the

conditions in which this risky last resort could be undertaken have, as Rogers rightly points out, been

underemphasized.

A General Theory

Thus, the Vegetian paradigm, modified to recognize a regular place for battle, does describe much

medieval European warfare, as well as much warfare beyond Europe throughout the pre-modern world.

Again, Vegetian strategy describes a cross-cultural and apparently natural way of waging war in the conditions

of pre-modern economics and technology. There are a significant number of exceptions to such apparently

natural and cross-cultural patterns, however, exceptions that take place within conditions of nature and

28Rogers in fact makes a convincing case that Edward did achieve almost all his war aims in 1360 (War Cruel and Sharp,

passim),and further claims (Vegetian Science of Warfare, n. 37) that including the post -1369 phases of the 100 Years War in ajudgement of Edwards results is logically similar to arguing that the Western Front offensive of 1918 was not decisive because theGermans launched another bid for world domination in 1939. This raises interesting philosophical, methodological andhistoriographical problems too complex to go into fully here. For one, it raises the problem of what we mean by decisive inreferring to either a battle or a campaign (see Morillo, ed., The Battle of Hastings: Sources and Interpretations,[Woodbridge: Boydell Press,

1996], xv-xvii, for a discussion of the meaning of decisiveness). No battle or campaign of the 100 Years War was decisive in theway Hastings was, for instance, as Williams victory in 1066 not only effectively won the war, it precluded any further war alongsimilar lines. This points to the problem of deciding whether Edwards victory in 1360 could be considered a stable basis for a reallylasting peace: did it eliminate the issues of contention that had led to the war in the first place? It is not unreasonable, I think, to say it

did not: only a complete takeover of France by the English monarchy or the complete expulsion of English lordship from French

territory could have done that (though the concepts of French and English in such a claim admittedly risk anachronism).Similarly, it is not in fact completely unreasonable to say from a broad, global and long-term perspective that the Western Front

offensive of 1918 was not decisive for precisely the reason Rogers cites. It certainly was not as decisive as the Allied victory in 1945,

for example.


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agriculture that might be expected to reproduce the patterns. Some occur in other societies than those

already mentioned, though in the same broad time frame; some occur within the societies and times just

outlined. What accounts for these exceptions, which are far more non-Vegetian than those cited by Rogers?

For his paper leaves the underlying assumptions of Vegetian warfare intact. Those underlying assumptions

are, briefly, as follows. First, that we can engage in a rational, materially based analysis of strategy, and that

this is what medieval commanders did. Second, that the material basis of strategy consisted of land; that is,

that warfare was territorial, or about the possession of castles, cities, and so forth. And third, that in making

these analyses, state interest is paramount; or, put another Clausewitzian way, warfare is politics by other

means, politics being construed as the dynamics of relationships between sovereign states.

Whether these underlying assumptions really apply to all medieval (or pre-modern) warfare is open to

question, however. Rather, I think there is a general principle that constitutes the often unexamined context

of Vegetian strategy and explains the major exceptions to it.29

In brief, here are what I see as the prerequisites for the appearance of Vegetian strategy in the pre-

modern world. First, that the entities involved in warfare are settled societies. This should be obvious, since

territoriality plays such a central role in the patterns of Vegetian strategy, but some thinking about the

implications of this condition can lead in productive directions. Second, that the entities involved in warfare

lack an agreed on context for dispute resolution. Such a context can consist either of universally accepted

cultural norms that govern conflict, or it can reside in a superior power capable of enforcing cultural norms

and/or legal rules. As we shall see, superior power can mean an entity which acts as the ultimate practical

broker of military might, or an entity that constitutes the exclusive source of legitimacy within a system. The

practical result of any sort of agreed on context for dispute resolution is to render warfare in important ways

non-territorial; if such contexts do not exist, territoriality tends to become central and leads to Vegetian

patterns.

In other words, Vegetian strategy is the natural mode of pre-modern warfare only when the

warfare occurs between sedentary (that is, agriculturally based) military actors engaged in foreign or external

wars, that is wars that cross political (and often cultural) boundaries. In addition, Vegetian strategy usually

(though not always) requires warfare that is guided by grand strategies of territorial aggrandizement or

conquest and defense thereagainst, within a geopolitical context that does not allow for flight by an entire

29While I shall focus as much as possible on exceptions within medieval western European military practice, I shall also

draw upon non-European cases where they provide striking comparative data or make a point more clearly than European cases

might. In addition to this practical matter of evidence, however, I also wish to make a philosophical point about the benefits of

studying medieval western European warfare comparatively and in the global context of its times.


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military-political entity as an option. In different ways, these preconditions are the implications of

territoriality.30

Non-Vegetian Warfare: A Selection of Counter-Examples

I shall try now to both explain and illustrate this principle via a set of counterexamples to Vegetian

patterns of strategy. With variations, all these counter-examples follow a pattern of warfare that is non-

Vegetian in specific ways. First, non-Vegetian wars do not revolve around fortifications, which tend to be

either absent, rudimentary, or ignored in the main activities of campaigns. We immediately face a cart-horse

problem here. It might be that the absence of knowledge or techniques for effectively fortifying strongholds

is a prior condition, that then precludes the emergence of classically Vegetian strategy in certain areas. I

think, however, that in almost every case examined below, effective fortifications (and thus Vegetian strategy)

were possible. Indeed, in most cases they existed, or had existed, or quickly came into existence when

conditions changed. Instead, the very strategic contexts and choices that made warfare non-Vegetian in these

cases also accounts for the lack of fortification. That is, lack of fortifications was a strategic choice.

It tended to accompany the other non-Vegetian feature of these counter-examples: that battle

seeking strategies dominated their warfare. Offensive campaigns aimed at meeting and destroying defending

forces directly (though pillaging and plundering were certainly a consistent concomitant of invasions, for both

logistical and psychological reasons). Likewise, defensive forces sought to meet and defeat in battle any

invading force. It is important to note that this is not the sort of one-sided battle seeking one finds with

some frequency in medieval warfare,31in which the ability (indeed expectation) of one side to refuse battle

marks the still essentially Vegetian nature of the warfare. For if a battle seeking commander can be fairly sure

that his opponent will seek to avoid battle, then his battle seeking behavior does not seriously violate

Vegetius prescription to avoid battleshe gets the benefit of appearing bold and aggressive with little of the

cost.

Rather, non-Vegetian warfare looks very different indeed. Consider, for example, the campaign and

battle of Barnet in April 1471. Edward VI, having returned from a brief exile in Flanders, gathered his

Yorkist supporters and marched on London. The Earl of Warwick (the Kingmaker) gathered Lancastrian

forces at Coventry and immediately pursued. After gaining entrance to the capital, Edward immediately

30The sense in which I am using territoriality is limited to warfare that was directly about possession of landed wealth,that is in which armed force was the deciding factor in possession. John France, Western Warfare,says that warfare in this period was,therefore, nearly always proprietorial, or at the least influenced by proprietorial considerations (2). While this is generally true,possession of land could be decided in ways that did not depend (at least directly) on warfare, and there are some instances, discussed

further below, in which warfare was not, centrally or even primarily, about possession of landed wealth.

31As Rogers abundantly illustrates.


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turned about and marched out to attack Warwicks force, though he was outnumbered by perhaps 9,000 to

12,000; the attack was launched in a heavy fog and, after a confused conflict in which each sides right wing

overlapped the others left, resulted in a complete victory.32 An earlier phase of the Wars of the Roses had

witnessed six significant battles fought between September 1459 and March 1461, culminating in the bloody

carnage at Towton, a battle fought in a blinding snowstorm.33 In short, non-Vegetian warfare was dominated

by two-sided seeking of battle to the exclusion of other aims, often to the point of both sides actively seeking

and agreeing on a mutually acceptable flat and open space on which to fight it out, calculations of numerical,

meterological and topographical advantage be damned.

Why did such exceptions to Vegetian patterns indeed to the apparently sound advice Vegetius

offers in favor of avoiding battle arise? There are two groups of cases to consider. The first set of

exceptions involve steppe nomads, and is relatively straightforward to explain. The second set involves

settled societies.

Warfare among steppe nomads was non-Vegetian for the simple reason that steppe nomad societies

were not territorial in the way sedentary societies were. Obviously, fortifications were impossible for societies

built on mobility. And possession of land for a nomadic tribe did not mean the same thing as it did for rulers

of sedentary societies. The latter aimed at control over the administrative apparatus, however developed, that

often resided in fortifications and that connected rulers to their source of wealth, a subject peasantry farming

the land. For nomads, possession of land meant actual occupation of grazing land so as to feed the source of

their wealth, animal herds. Thus, in warfare between nomadic tribes, a territorial attack meant moving the

present occupiers off coveted grazing land; defense meant direct resistance to such an attack. Nomadic

groups could also hold in reserve the option of flight to other lands should an attack prove too difficult to

resist, and could furthermore join their attackers in an alliance that had few if any permanent administrative

consequences.34 For nomadic warfare was often almost totally non-territorial, in that warfare was a tool for

establishing dominance hierarchies among tribes, an activity in which assassination and gift-giving

complemented warfare. In these sorts of territorial or dominance disputes, battle was the clear and swiftly

sought arbiter.

32Anthony Goodman, The Wars of the Roses, (London: Routledge, 1981), 78-80.

33Goodman, 41-53.

34Whittow, Making of Byzantium, 19-25, has a good summary with references of steppe nomadic geography, social and

political structure, and style of warfare. One of the features that distinguished Genghis Khans unification of the steppes from earliersteppe empires was his invention of a new tribe system that replaced old tribal divisions, a form of permanent administrativeconsequence, but one very different from what would happen in sedentary societies. See David Morgan,The Mongols (Cambridge,

1990).


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The world view bred on the steppes tended to carry over in nomadic attacks on sedentary neighbors,

as invading steppe armies preferred meeting (and beating) opposing armies directly when they aimed at

conquest or widespread plunder. The Mongol invasions of Russia and Eastern Europe can serve as an

example of this.35 Only when the defenders retreated to fortifications (in good Vegetian fashion) were

nomadic invaders forced either to give up conquest in favor of simple plundering, or, if trickery could not

gain them a city, to adopt sedentary siege techniques (usually by conscripting sedentary engineers). At that

point, they became part of the natural Vegetian web of sedentary strategy, as they effectively became a

sedentary army for the duration and in the vicinity of any siege warfare they conducted.

Thus, war between settled societies was a precondition for Vegetian strategy. Under what conditions

did warfare involving settled societies become non-Vegetian?

Simply, if warfare took place withina closed cultural or political world that in one way or another

established rules that governed the meaning and practice of conflict, Vegetian strategy had no role to play. I

see three main ways in which such rules appeared: as agreed norms in a cultural world; as agreed norms in a

political system; or as legal rules within a political system. The existence of such norms or rules obviated

Vegetian strategies by rendering warfare non-territorial, either directly or indirectly. Directly, such norms or

rules could dictate that warfare was not, in fact, about territory, but was about prestige, hierarchy, or

elimination of rivals. Indirectly, such norms and rules could make possession of territory contingent not

upon occupation protected by fortification but upon legal or moral title conferred by some central authority.

I shall illustrate each of these and show the similarities in the sort of warfare each produced.

By agreed norms in a cultural world, I mean those areas in which warfare took place between entities

which were independent politically, but which shared a culturally agreed on set of assumptions about how

warfare was conducted, what it meant, and what it could decide. An good example is polis warfare in the

Hellenic world, especially before the Persian wars. Victor Davis Hanson has shown that the tradition of face-

to-face combat between phalanxes used to settle disputes between Greek city-states served the function of

limiting campaigning and therefore economic disruption:

Ultimate victory in the modern sense and enslavement of the conquered were not

considered an option by either side. Greek hoplite battles were struggles betweensmall landholders who by mutual consent sought to limit warfare (and hence killing) to

a brief, nightmarish occasion [emphasis added].36

35Denis Sinor, "The Mongols and Western Europe" in A History of the Crusades, vol.3, (Madison, 1975).

36Victor Davis Hanson, The Western Way of War. Infantry Battle in Classical Greece (New York: Knopf, 1989), 4.


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In other words, city-states in conflict tacitly agreed to a large scale version of the lets step outside and settle

this system of dispute resolution, producing mostly localized and increasingly ritualized warfare in a fairly

balanced system of poleis.37 Combat rarely resulted in large scale transfers or conquest of land, and

compromised the political independence of the losing side only indirectly.38 Note that the rules of this

system were nowhere written down, nor was there an overarching power that could enforce them. Note also

how the system broke down. First, the Persian invasions introduced a player who did not know the rules.

The result was the first emergence of large coalitions ofpoleis and the first real use of strategy by the Greeks.

The subsequent growth of the Athenian Empire, both as a direct result and continuation of the Persian

invasions and because Athens came to rely on naval power, further violated the tacit norms, whose

bankruptcy was fully revealed in the Peloponesian Wars. In the absence of these cultural norms limiting

conflict, it fell to the Macedonians and then the Romans to impose peace on Hellas.39

A very similar system of tacit cultural norms seems to have governed the world of Aztec warfare.

Campaigns took place only at certain times of the year, according to apparently stereotyped patterns, and

operated at greater or lesser levels of ritualism ranging from Flower Wars to full scale invasions of conquest.

Unlike in Greece, conquest and political independence were at stake. Despite this, the constraints of the

cultural system were such that no real equivalent of Vegetian strategy emerged in the Mexican world. Battle

seeking predominated. Fortifications were effective when used because breaching them was difficult given

the limited siege technology available, scaling was expensive in manpower, and sieges were logistically difficult

to maintain. Fortifications were seldom used, however, because, even if they were effective, the city could

not be divorced from its wider social networks.40

The presence of agreed norms in a political system is the second condition that could inhibit the

emergence of Vegetian patterns. Kamakura Japan (1185-1333) provides an excellent example of this

condition.41 The civil government in Kyoto headed by the emperor was accepted as the only source of

37Kurt Raaflaub, Archaic and Classical Greece in Raaflaub and Rosenstein, 140.

38The gradual creation by Sparta of a dominion in the Peloponnese is the only real exception to this pattern, and happened

in such a way as not to seriously undermine the cultural system: Sparta was in some ways recognized as a political and military

exception. Raaflaub, Archaic and Classical Greece, 131.

39 Raaflaub, Archaic and Classical Greece, 147; Charles D. Hamilton, The Hellenistic World in Raaflaub andRosenstein, 165-166.

40Ross Hassig, The Aztec World in Raaflaub and Rosenstein, 361-381, quote on 378; in more detail Hassig, Aztec Warfare(Norman, University of Oklahoma Press, 1988).

41For general overviews of the Kamakura political and military systems and the warrior culture that dominated them see

Paul Varley, Warriors of Japan as Portrayed in the War Tales(Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1994); Stephen Turnbull, The Samurai.

A Military History (London: Osprey, 1977); Morillo, Guns and Government: A Comparative Study of Europe and Japan, Journal ofWorld History6 (1994), 75-106.


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legitimacy within this political system; what it legitimated was possession of income rights based on landed

estates called shoen. The military government in Kamakura backed up the civil authority and with it

constituted a greater central authority. Thus, for a clan to gain land, income, and power it had to exert

control over this combined central authority. Battle seeking strategies made perfect sense in the context of

factional struggles for control over central authority. Since occupation of any particular piece of land itself

meant very little, almost nobody built fortifications of any size or complexity and consequently no one tried

to remove rivals by besieging them or ravaging their land. There was no their land that was specifically

identifiable, there were no castles to besiege. Instead, legitimation of income possession by the central

government was universally accepted, and with no castles to take, a faction had to seek battle in order to kill

its enemies so that the income rights those enemies held could be reassigned. The result is illustrated

abundantly in war tales such as The Tale of the Heike:

That day, Lord Kiso grasped a rattan-wrapped bow and sat in a gold-edged

saddle astride his famous horse Oniashige [Roan Demon], a very stout and brawny

animal. Standing in his stirrups, he announced his name in a mighty voice. You

must have heard of Kiso no Kanja in the past; now you see him! I am the Morning

Sun Commander Minamoto no Yoshinaka, Director of the Imperial Stables of the

Left and Governor of Iyo Province. They tell me you are Ichijo no Jiro from Kai.

We are well matched! Cut off my head and show it to Yoritomo! He galloped

forward, shouting.

The warrior who has just announced his name is their Commander-in-Chief,

Ichijo no Jiro said. Wipe out the whole force, men! Get them all, young retainers!Kill them!42

Here both the ritualized name calling, part of an individualistic mode of combat, and the intent to kill sit side-

by-side with the official titles and offices that reveal the central role of imperial political legitimation within

the political system. In general Kamakura warfare featured battle seeking strategies and warfare that

combined some highly ritualized elements such as name calling and ritualized exchanges of arrows before

battle with an unusually high level (by western European standards in the same centuries) of killing of elite

warriors by elite warriors, including the prevalence of hara kiru, a form of suicide that dressed fatality itself in

ritual. And as Wayne Farris notes, A few expert warriors dominated the battlefield, fighting in a colorful,

highly ritualized way. Such a military system presupposed a general agreement regarding what war was all about.43

42The Tale of the Heike,ed. And trans. Helen Craig McCullough (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), 291-292.

43W. Wayne Farris, Japan to 1300 in Raaflaub and Rosenstein, 66 (emphasis added). And see S. Morillo, Cultures ofDeath: Ritual Suicide in Medieval Europe and Japan, The Medieval History Journal(forthcoming, 2001) on the connection betweenkilling and strategy in Kamakura Japan.


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One might say that this is simply a case of civil war, and civil war tends to be non-Vegetian. I think

this gets it backwards. Civil war tends to be non-Vegetian because civil war tends to happen within a political

system with agreed norms or agreed legal rules (my next case, which I will get to in a moment). But not all

civil wars conform to this condition. The way the Kamakura system of tacitly agreed norms broke down is

instructive in this regard. The Kamakura regime ended in a civil war between two factions of the Imperial

family that lasted from 1336 to 1392. This division of the imperial symbolic position undermined its ability to

legitimate dispute settlements, and the war turned not only very messy and confused, but Vegetian, in that

fortifications sprang up, and the weaker side resorted to ambushes, logistical warfare, and guerilla

campaigning. The Muromachi regime (1336-1467) that emerged managed briefly to hold the vestiges of the

political system together, but after the Onin War of 1467-77 Japan broke into fully independent states

engaged in warfare that conformed pretty closely to Vegetian patterns, though the cultural legacy of the

Kamakura age contributed, along with other factors, to keep battle seeking more common than it might

otherwise have been.44

The boundary between my first two conditions, agreed norms in a cultural world and agreed norms

in a political system, are fuzzy, as what constitutes a political system is often a matter of cultural agreement.

By way of illustration, I think Anglo-Saxon warfare can be analyzed in either way. Why did Anglo-Saxon

England not follow the same trajectory of castellation as the Continent, especially after 950 or so? Not

because the Anglo-Saxons were backwards in military science or ignorant of effective methods of

fortification, but because, even in the period of multiple Saxon kingdoms, the set of kingdoms formed either

a cultural world, or even a political system headed by a high king (whether actual or only potential), that

agreed on battle as the honorable mode of dispute resolution. Long warfare with the Vikings, who avoided

battle to focus on easy plunder, upset this system in ways similar to the way the Persians disrupted the Greek

system (including provoking political unity, though in the Anglo-Saxon case through the elimination of all the

native kingdoms save Wessex, as opposed to the Persian stimulation of Athenian empire building). Alfreds

burgh system was the Vegetian aspect of the Saxon response: a network of fortified cities designed to restrict

and Viking raids and provide bases for thefyrd,the Saxon field army.45 But the continuing importance of this

field army in Alfreds system shows that the king retained the Saxon tendency to battle seeking even as he

waged a somewhat more Vegetian style of warfare. Contrast the Saxon response with the contemporary anti-

Viking strategy on the Continent, Charles the Balds fortified bridges. Though designed, like the burghs, to

44Morillo, Guns and Government, 86-87; Turnbull, 89-106.

45Richard Abels,Alfred the Great. War, Kingship and Culture in Anglo-Saxon England(London: Longman, 1998), 194-218.


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restrict Viking mobility, they did not house substantial numbers of troops, nor was there a French field army

comparable to the fyrdbacking them up and seeking battle with the invaders, as Charles realm was already

devolving into fragmentation, private castellation, and Vegetian battle-avoiding strategy.46 And the

reunification of England under the West Saxons aborted its Vegetian tendencies once the Vikings were

defeated: unified Anglo-Saxon England reverted to its unfortified battle seeking ways, though for somewhat

different reasons than before the Vikings, reasons that will bring us below to the third condition that often

produced non-Vegetian warfare, legal rules in a political system.

Agreed norms, political and especially cultural, since they operated either in the absence of a central

authority or under one that could not militarily impose judgements, tended to be policed by notions of

honor, face, and prestige. These were not just diplomatic coin to be expended in a strategy guided by rational

material analysis,47but cultural realities in and of themselves. In fact, the imperatives of honor, demanding

immediate and decisive responses to affronts, could conflict pretty directly with the rational guidelines ofVegetian strategy. Much medieval warfare can profitably be read as manifesting a tension between the honor-

based and therefore battle seeking imperatives of a European-wide cultural system whose ultimate rationale

was let God decide in trial by battle, and the territorial based and therefore Vegetian imperatives of a

divided European political universe. The cultural system was too weak for its norms to dominate, but strong

enough to complicate many approaches to strategy that might have profited from a more purely Vegetian

approach. Philip Augustus conduct of the Bouvines campaign is a good example of this tension, as the king

seemed to move, sometimes by sheer force of circumstance, between one approach and the other; even if he

did not actively seek the battle that resulted, he accepted (and subsequently exploited) it terms reflecting the

culture of trial by battle.48 Philip VI of France faced this dilemma even more acutely during Edward IIIs

46Carroll Gillmor, The Logistics of Fortified Bridge Building on the Seine under Charles the Bald, ANS11 (1988), 87-106.

47Cf. Rogers, Vegetian Science of War, [page], who does analyze these notions in such terms: Loyalty was one of thebasic currencies of power. Another basic element of a lords power was his honor or prestige, and implementing a Fabian strategycould be costly in this coin too. While certainly correct from one perspective, this analysis underplays, I believe, the independentrole factors such as prestige could play in strategic decision making, drawing such decisions outside the realm of purely material (and

often, state-centered) analysis.

48See France, Western Warfare, 169-172; Georges Duby, The Legend of Bouvines. War, Religion and Culture in the Middle Ages,trans. Catherine Tihanyi (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). Of course it is true that honor is a flexible notion, and that

what confers honor or prestige can vary from culture to culture honor need not compel face-to-face battle seeking. Ambushes,feigned flights, night attacks, and other trickery could all be honorable actions in a variety of warrior traditions, including the steppe

nomadic, the Japanese, the Byzantine, and even the western European: William Marshals career abounds in ambushes (see DavidCrouch, William Marshal: Court, Career and Chivalry in the Angevin Empire 1147-1219[London: Addison Wesley, 1993]). This was because

the ultimate measure of honor and prestige was, usually, success, and such tactics raised the chance for victory. But, especially in the

western European tradition with the influence of legal trial by battle, direct affronts to ones face required a face-to-face response,in both the literal and figurative senses of the term.


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invasions of 1339 and 1340, as his rationally calculated avoidance of battle conflicted with strong demands on

the part of his aristocracy that he defend his own honor and by extension that of France. 49 The fate of

Harold Godwinson also comes to mind here. A number of modern commentators have criticized Harold for

responding too eagerly to Duke Williams ravaging of the vicinity of Hastings, leaving himself open to

Williams attack or perhaps choosing himself to attack. Analyzing Williams battle-seeking strategy in 1066,

Gillingham says Of course it takes two to make a battle. It may be that, as I have suggested elsewhere

(Gillingham, Richard I, 85), Harold was adopting the standard defensive strategy [moving close enough to

limit Williams foraging without actually offering battle]. Or it may be that, encouraged by his success in the

Battle of Stamford Bridge, Harold himself wanted to repeat this new and intoxicating experience.50 But of

course, Harold may well have been seeking battle not to repeat a new and intoxicating experience but

because the lands being ravaged, as part of his patrimony, raised a strong demand for an immediate response

based in honor and prestige, a demand that Harold would have seen from the perspective of a political

system in which battle seeking was more the norm than on the Continent, as I have just noted. The Vegetian

response of trapping William on the Hastings peninsula and starving him to death may never have occurred

to him or, if it did, could have appeared dishonorable.51

Resolution of this tension tended to move, over the medieval centuries, towards the Vegetian side of

the equation, because the more European polities became territorially based, the more Vegetian their

strategies became and the farther they moved from the cultural system, probably Germanic and tribal in its

origins, that encouraged trial-by-battle-motivated battle seeking. Arguably, the warfare of strongly territorial

17thand 18thcentury Europe was more Vegetian, despite the presence of gunpowder weaponry,52than the

warfare of the weakly territorial Germanic kingdoms of the early middle ages. Or at least, the assumptions

behind the Merovingian sources narratives seem to indicate the normality of battle seeking motivated by

questions of honor and guided by divine judgement. An example from among many in Gregory of Tours:

The widow of Clovis I, Clotilda, urges her sons to war with the Burgundian rulers Sigismund and Godomar

because the of formers palace murders, saying be angry, I beg you, at this insult to me, and avenge with a

wise zeal my mother and fathers death. Led by Chlodomer, the Franks march to an immed iate battle with

49Rogers, War Cruel and Sharp,Chs. 7 and 9.

50Gillingham, William the Bastard at War, 158 n. 107.

51On Hastings, see Morillo, Warfare under the Anglo-Norman Kings, 163-168; and The Battle of Hastings: Sources and Interpretations

(Woodbridge: Boydell, 1996).

52Especially at the height of what Christopher Duffy calls the Old Fortress Warfare between 1660 and 1715: Duffy, TheFortress in the Age of Vauban, 1-63; also Van Creveld, Supplying War, 37: eighteenth-century armies lived as their predecessors hadalways done, by taking the bulk of their needs away from the country.


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the Burgundians in which Sigismund, the divine vengeance attending on his footsteps, is captured.

Godomar rallies the Burgundians and regains his kingdom, however. Chlodomer then oversteps his role as

divine avenger by killing Sigismund an apparently rational act designed to prevent an uprising in his rear,

but one warned against by abbot Avitus before marching again against Godomar. Thus, Chlodomer wins

the ensuing battle but is killed in the pursuit; the Franks crushed the Burgundians and reduced their country

to subjection, but shortly after Godomar again recovers his kingdom.53 Thus, we are presented with warfare

that features battle seeking behavior on both sides, motivated by notions of personal honor and bravery. And

though possession of landed kingdoms is apparently at stake, the ease of Godomars recoveries (as well as the

actions of the Franks in killing men rather than taking fortifications) indicates that what really matters is

possession of the loyalty of men. In such a weakly territorial context, as in Kamakura Japan, battle seeking

and abundant killing made perfect sense, despite their irrationality from a Vegetian perspective.

So strong territoriality corresponded with Vegetian warfare. Or at least, coming back to my basic

principle, strong territoriality corresponded to Vegetian warfare when the polities involved fought external

wars. The final condition that can lead to exceptions to Vegetian patterns is the existence of a system in

which the legal rules of a polity govern and legitimate landed possession. Such conditions almost assume a

strong territorial state, but the very strength of the state is what makes warfare within the polity only indirectly

territorial. Here, the example returns us to England.

I noted above that the reunification of Anglo-Saxon England54aborted its Vegetian development.

But this was not because the earlier world of tacitly agreed norms had been reestablished, though the earlier

traditions certainly contributed to the formation of the post-Viking strategic consensus. Rather, possession

of land and other matters of dispute were now policed by a relatively strong central authority.55 That is, the

aristocracy of Anglo-Saxon England looked to the central authority to protect their domestic titles to landed

estates. A centralized legal system short-circuited any impetus towards private castellation, and Vegetian

strategy had no soil in which to take root. The same royal power also protected the kingdom as a whole,

though of course the warrior aristocracy constituted in themselves a significant part of the royal governments

53Gregorio di Tours, La Storia dei Franchi, ed. Massimo Oldoni, (Fondazione Lorenzo Valla, 1981): III.6 (v1, 218-220),

translations adapted from Gregory Bishop of Tours, History of the Franks,trans. Ernest Brehaut(New York: Norton, 1969), 55-56. Inthe immediately following episode, Theodoric leads the Franks against the Thuringi, which again results in an immediate battle: III.7

(v1, pp 220-22);.

54 Or as Kelly DeVries would properly say, Anglo-Scandinavian England: see The Norwegian Invasion of England in 1066

(Woodbridge: Boydell, 1999).

55James Campbell, The Anglo-Saxon State(London: Hambledon, 2000) demonstrates clearly the power, sophistication, unity

and wealth of the late Anglo-Saxon state. For the specifically military implications of royal control see Richard Abels, Lordship and

Military Obligation in Anglo-Saxon England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).


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military forces against outside invaders.56 But the centrally controlled, battle-seeking system that served the

kingdom well internally and in disputes along its Celtic frontiers had, by its nature, a peculiar bi-polarity

against major foreign invasions: it could marshal more significant forces than many weaker Continental

polities could (as it did in 1066, defeating at least one major invader in Harald Hardraada 57), but if it were

defeated at the top (as it was by Cnut by 1016 and by William of Normandy in 1066), the victor stood a good

chance of assuming control of the system from the center, roughly the same goal that internal disputants

aimed at.

The Norman conquest in 1066 introduced castellation to England, as the conquerors subdued their

new realm through ravaging and a purely Vegetian display of territorial and logistical brute force.58 Vegetian

patterns continued to predominate along the Welsh and Scottish borders of the kingdom, later in the Norman

invasion of Ireland, and above all on the frontiers of Normandy. Within England, Robert of Bellemes 1102

revolt against Henry II, the Civil War of Stephens reign (which, however, saw more battle-seeking behavior,at Lincoln and Wilton, than proved prudent for either side), and the Young King Henrys rebellion of 1173-

74 against his father Henry II were all conducted in Vegetian style Henry IIs success at not fighting battles

is often cited in defense of the Vegetian nature of medieval warfare. And Stephens reign shows that not all

civil wars are non-Vegetian. But the Vegetian interlude within the kingdom in fact did not last long, because

the long periods of peace that intervened in the 12 thcentury, as well as the nature of the settlements imposed

after the Civil War by Henry II, in the years following 1154, reinforced and resulted from the foundations of

royal power laid in the Anglo-Saxon period. Increasingly from Henry Is reign and progressing rapidly after

1054, lawwhat evolved into the Common Law became the arbiter of disputes about estate possession.59

By 1215 the relationship of the various parts of the political community within the political system had been

considerably clarified, and the government as a whole was even stronger, even if Magna Carta formalized

nascent restrictions on the king himself. Thereafter, warfare within England was not (directly) about landed

possession, but instead was about influence over the central authority that guaranteed possession of landed

estates. The result was warfare that was non-Vegetian because conflict was bounded by the legal rules of the

political system. As in Kamakura Japan, contestants for control of the central authority sought each other out

56As for example at Maldon in 991, where Earl Byrhtnoths forces displayed all the battle-seeking, non-Vegetian impulsesbased in both honor and royal dutythe Anglo-Saxon military system bred.

57DeVries,Norwegian Invasion.

58Gillingham, William the Bastard at War, 159.

59 John Hudson, Land, Law and Lordship in Anglo-Norman England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994) is the best

starting point for investigating this process. See also C. Warren Hollister, Henry I,(Yale University Press, 2001), esp. 349-369, who

emphasizes the role of Henrys imposition of peace in England on stability of landholding.


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to settle dominance directly. The stark contrast between the castle-centered, logistical approach Henry I took

in subduing Robert of Bellemes rebellion in 1102 and Edward Is battle-seeking 1265 Evesham campaign

against Simon de Montfort, in which castles played only a minor role, shows just how far the parameters of

strategy had been transformed by the evolution of central authority in England. 60 By the Wars of the Roses,

castles played almost no role and opposing forces sought each other out even in snow and fog for decisive,

face-to-face contests for possession of the only thing that mattered, control of royal government and the

legitimacy it conveyed. Even pillaging was limited. And just as in Kamakura warfare, the battles of the Wars

of the Roses featured copious killing of nobles by other nobles as factions attempted not to take over land

but to eliminate rivals for control of the central authority. But unlike in Japan, possession of the central

authority here carried with it the ability to muster the force necessary to coerce cooperation within the system

and the legitimacy to use it. Thus, from 1215 until the last Stuart uprisings in the 18thcentury, warfare within

England was both rare and, when it happened, characterized by battle seeking strategies aimed at eliminating

rivals for control of a central authority whose presence and role were uncontested.61

Warfare outside England was of course another matter. There is no more Vegetian conquest than

Edward Is subjugation of Wales. Many English campaigns in Scotland were Vegetian: forays such as William

Is in 1072 designed to inflict some damage and intimidate the Scots, with no expectation of battle (even

sieges were infrequent); most Scottish campaigns into England were likewise glorified plundering raids that

earned the Scots an evil reputation south of the border.62And the French side of Edward IIIs campaigns in

France is perfectly comprehensible from a Vegetian perspective.63 As for Edwards side, if we accept, as I

think we should, Rogers reinterpretation of Edwards intentions that he did actively seek battle several

thoughts come to mind. Perhaps Edward was simply a bad strategist who failed to follow sound Vegetian

advice. But since he not only sought but fought and won his battles and thereby gained most of his war aims

at least temporarily,64this seems unconvincing. Perhaps he sought battle only with every advantage of terrain

601102: C. Warren Hollister, The Campaign of 1102 against Robert of Belleme in StudiesPresented to R. Allen Brown.1265: Nicholas Hooper and Matthew Bennett, Cambridge Illustrated Atlas of Warfare; The Middle Ages 768-1487(Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1996), 67-69. The behavior of the rebels also illustrates the change, as Robert, in Vegetian fashion, holed his forces

up in his castles and eventually fled to Normandy, while Simon actively sought battle in 1264, leading to his victory at Lewes, and

though attempting to avoid Edward in 1265 still based his strategy on a field army capable of giving battle.

61 The contrast between the battle-seeking of the 17th century Civil War in England and the Vegetian nightmare that

prevailed for much of the Thirty Years War is another example of the English political condition.

62Matthew Strickland, War and Chivalry. The Conduct and Perception of War in England and Normandy, 1066-1217(Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1996), 291-329.

63As Rogers admits: Rogers, Vegetian Science of War, [page]; though note also the tension I suggested between PhilipsVegetian inclinations and the demands to defend his honor raised by the European cultural system: above, 16 and n.48.

64See above, 7 and n.28,on the problem of deciding whether Edwards battle-seeking strategy ultimately worked.


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he could get to exploit his weapons system, in other words, within an essentially Vegetian context.65 Perhaps

he was torn between what he saw as the imperatives of honor and the guidelines of Vegetius. Or, most

interestingly, perhaps his battle seeking strategy is evidence, given what Ive said above about political

systems, that Edward really did think of his invasions of France as personal disputes with rival claimants to

the French throne to be settled in the time-honored English tradition of fighting on the battlefield for

possession of the central government, in which case his immediate operational problem (skillfully overcome

in 1346) and his long-term dilemma was that his opponents did not play by the rules.

Conclusions

This leads me to two points I want to stress by way of conclusion. My first point has to do with the

predictive or analytic power of a theory. I hope by presenting the contexts of Vegetian strategy in such

general and fundamental terms by getting at the underlying assumptions of Vegetian warfare that it

becomes possible to reanalyze aspects of the past in new and enlightening ways. For example, if I am right

about the preconditions for the emergence of Vegetian patterns in warfare, then the presence of Vegetian

warfare should in turn predict a lack of agreed on norms of warfare or of accepted legal rules and arbiters

thereof in the region being examined. For instance, unlike warfare in England, warfare in Capetian France

tended to be Vegetian even when foreign players were not involved; or, put another way, most warfare

within France had the character of foreign wars. In other words, this theory provides another way of

seeing and analyzing a long-accepted difference between England and France in the middle ages: England was

from fairly early on a unified kingdom (the universal acceptance of whose government as final arbiter created

conditions for non-Vegetian warfare); France was a kingdom stitched together by foreign conquest, which

reminds us of the very recent and constructed nature of French nationality and culture.

My second point has to do with the role of culture in warfare. I have tried to show that strategic

decisions happen in cultural contexts, and that different contexts make some strategies more useful than

others. This may seem a simple point, but it is too easy to slip into analysis of warfare purely in terms of

materialist rationalism, state interest (as opposed to the individual, familial, dynastic and class interests of

rulers and elites), and realpolitique,and so misunderstand what the historical actors we study were really about

(or at least what they thought they were about, which matters a lot.) Warfare is not just politics by other

means, as Clausewitz said, it is also culture. Or if it is politics, pre-modern politics includes a lot more than

65This is the implication of Rogers analysis in War Cruel and Sharp,where Edward is shown, while seeking battle, to havemaneuvered carefully to arrive at a battle field and tactical situation of his own choosing: 235-6. Crecy was not, in other words,

Towton or Barnet. I think this possibili ty accounts for a good deal of Edwards battle seeking: it was reasonable within a Vegetiancontext.


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just statecraft, and so might as well be culture in many cases. This is not to say that medieval strategists were

irrational, though as in any age not all medieval generals were good strategists. It is to say that their rational

concerns often included notions of personal honor, prestige, religious imperatives, superstition, and so on

that we do not readily recognize as relevant to strategy, especially in the context of statecraft. My analysis of

the assumptions underlying Vegetian strategy is therefore designed to remind us that cultures of war played

a major implicit role in sciences of war, even when they werent explicitly obvious.

Stephen Morillo

Wabash College

morillo battle seeking-libre

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