Knighthood and the Realities of War in Medieval Germany

Military history as a subfield within medieval studies has suffered considerably from the fact that both medieval authors and modern scholars have seen warfare as a nasty element of the human experience, that is better condemned or even ignored than studied. As a consequence, the examination of warfare is often treated as an adjunct to other areas of inquiry, with the result that many well-meaning historians continue to pass along shibboleths long-since discarded by the relatively small number of specialists in medieval military history. This is particularly true with regard to scholarship dealing with the German kingdom because very few non-German speaking historians do much work on Germany, and German-speaking historians, with some notable exceptions, particularly in Switzerland and Austria, have eschewed the study of military matters in the period since the Second World War. One particularly important shibboleth, which still permeates studies of the German kingdom, is the notion that warfare was dominated by small numbers of warrior aristocrats who fought on horseback. In this paper, I will be addressing four major themes that are intended to illuminate the bankruptcy of this model. These are “knighthood” as a problem of military history, the reality of warfare in pre-crusade Europe, the centrality of sieges and fortifications to warfare, and finally the implications of this third fact for our understanding of the scope and scale of warfare, and the concomitant nature of governmental organization.