Found a really interesting website today about a society aiming to recreate medieval and renaissance sword-fighting methods based on the instructions produced during the period. It is the Association for Renaissance Martial Arts. They have a fairly extensive website with plenty of interesting discussion of medieval fighting styles. They also rightly point out that what we see in movies is about as far removed from reality as The Hobbit. Very interesting site and worth checking out.
Medieval History
Discussion and analysis of Medieval Military History
Book Review: The Last Full Measure: How Soldiers Die in Battle by Michael Stephenson
[FULL DISCLOSURE: I received my copy of this book free from the publisher for purposes of reviewing it. I was not paid for this review and the opinion expressed is purely my own] Michael Stephenson’s work The Last Full Measure: How Soldiers Die in Battle follows somewhat in the tradition of classics such a Keegan’s The Face of Battle and Victor David Hanson’s The Western Way of War. Where it differs from these two works as that while Keegan and Hanson focus on specific battles or time periods this book aims to be a more general description of the experience of combat throughout recorded history. In that, the book is … More after the Jump…
De Re Militari is back up
Just a quick info post.
Anybody who has tried to follow the link to DeReMilitari on the sidebar of the blog in the past few weeks has discovered that Google says it is a malware hosting site. They were hacked at the beginning of the month but are now back up. They are having to completely rebuild their site because apparently the malware got them good. So far they have their review section up because it was not affected by the hack. The rest of their site should come back up over the next few weeks or months.
Glad to see them back they are an invaluable starting point for Medieval research.
Saint John of Nepomuk in Prague
I went to Prague last weekend with my family and took the opportunity to walk across the Charles Bridge where St. John of Nepomuk was martyred. There are two shrines to St. John on the bridge and both are crowded. I took some photos while I was there and they are blow with description sin the captions. It was interesting to walk across the Charles Bridge because it is full of statuary and shrines along its entire 520m length. Man are difficult to interpret and the inscriptions are so worn that it is difficult to make out what they say. Well, the pictures are below. … More after the Jump…
The Combat of the Thirty
Here is an interesting episode that occurred in March, 1351 during the Hundred Years War. It occurred during the Hundred Years War but was only really a peripheral part of it. The combat occurred between the French garrison of Josselin Castle and the English garrison of Ploërmel Castle Brittany, part of modern day France. It was instigated because the English were not abiding by the terms a truce that had been made locally. The challenge to combat was issued by the French commander Jean de Beaumanoir to Robert Bramborough. On 26 or 27 March, 1351 the challengers met each other midway between the two castles with 29 retainers … More after the Jump…
The Cathars and the Albigensian Crusade
The Cathars were a radical religious sect that had taken root in southern France and by the early thirteenth century a good part of the population of the area were Cathars. The Cathars held radically different beliefs from Christianity and are properly considered a different religion entirely, rather than a perversion of Christianity itself.[1] They believed that there were two worlds the spiritual and the material, only the spiritual was clean of sin while the material world was inherently sinful. In order to escape the inherent sinfulness of their human existence the Cathars underwent a ritual known as the consolamentum. This ritual was a kind of combination … More after the Jump…
The Peace of Augsburg and Modern Germany
The Peace of Augsburg is the settlement between the Holy Roman Emperor and all his princes and nobility that established that the religion of a locality in Imperial Germany will be the same as that of its ruler. The only two religions allowed were what we today call Lutheranism and Roman Catholicism. At the Peace every German state and principality had its religion determined. Many people may wonder what the 460 year old Religious Peace of Augsburg has to do with a modern European state. I did too until recently when I started to think about it. Let me lay out my train of thought. … More after the Jump…
Medieval Armor was heavy; Is this a Surprise?
I ran across this article on discovery news today: Heavy Armor Led to French Knights’ Loss.The article immediately irritated me. Perhaps it was the way the article was written or perhaps it was the content of the interviews with the guys who did the study. The gist of the story is that some English researchers had some medieval reenactor volunteers don period medieval armor and do various exercises on a treadmill while their various bodily functions were measured such as breathing, heart rate, etc. The article makes out as if it is a surprise that one, medieval suits of plate mail were heavy and two, that knights tire rapidly while … More after the Jump…
Book Review: The Face of Battle by John Keegan
I have to caveat this review somewhat. I wrote this book review for an undergrad military history course I took almost six-years ago. I still think that the The Face of Battle is an excellent book. I have modified my opinion of Keegan as a historian somewhat though. I think he is somewhat overrated and he tends to simplistic British-centric judgements in his analysis of military history. He is a good historian, but sometimes his interpretations of events are not all they could be. “The Face of Battle†by John Keegan has become a classic in the thirty years since it was published. The … More after the Jump…
The Preparedness of the First Crusade
The First Crusade was arguably the most successful of the various numbered crusades; however, they were not particularly well equipped for a campaign in Asia Minor. It is no surprise that they were not, as the climate in Anatolia is completely different from Europe. What is amazing is the way in which the crusaders persevered in spite of the hardships they had to endure throughout the march across Asia Minor. The main crusader army seems to have had an appreciation for the difficulties involved in a march across Anatolia; no doubt; the counsel of the Byzantine emperor, Alexius I Comnenus (1081–1118) was helpful in their choice of march … More after the Jump…
Europe and the Crusading Impulse
Europe in the tenth and eleventh centuries was a continent in transition. The states of Europe were still in flux and the kings of Europe had limited authority outside their own personal demesne. Although individual French kings did wield considerable power, they waged a constant struggle to have their authority recognized by the great magnates in France, especially after the fall of the Carolingian dynasty in the ninth century[1]. The rest of Europe was no exception, in England the king was engaged in a great struggle with his leading barons and the Pope that would not be settled until the signing of the Magna Carta in 1215[2]. … More after the Jump…
Book Review: Empires of the Sea: The Siege of Malta, The Battle of Lepanto, and the Contest for the Center of the World by Roger Crowley
I am planning a vacation trip to Malta this summer with my family and like all vacations I take there will be an element of historical tourism involved. I have always wanted to visit Malta and I am finally getting a chance. As preparation for that I am reading a few books with accounts of The Great Siege of 1565, the last battle of the Medieval Crusades. The first book is Empires of the Sea: The Siege of Malta, the Battle of Lepanto, and the Contest for the Center of the World by Roger Crowley. Crowley does an excellent job of bringing the siege to life and … More after the Jump…
UPDATE: Saint John of Nepomuk
I wrote a post about Saint John of Nepomuk a week or so ago and at the time I wanted to post a picture of the statue near my house but had been too lazy to stop on my way to work and take picture. I fixed that yesterday and here are the photos. The first one is a full-length photo of the statue and the second is a close-up of the inscription. The statue stands on the bridge over one branch of the creek that flows behind my house. The stream’s name is the Flötbach (Flute Stream), but of course it is the Shrierbach where it is adjacent to … More after the Jump…
Saint John of Nepomuk
The region of Germany where I live in northeastern Bavaria is locally known as the Oberpfalz or in English the Upper Palatinate. Traditionally, this area was not part of Bavaria but was made up of numerous small separate sovereignties with a regional identity. This was a relic of the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia that ended the Thrity-Years War. That all changed in 1805 when Napoleon overran Germany and reduced the 350+ sovereign entities in Germany to 39, this is when the Oberpfalz became part of Bavaria. Of note is that the vast majority of the people in the region are Roman Catholic, my town is 95% Catholic for example. The … More after the Jump…
The Military Aspects of Feudalism in Europe in the early Middle Ages
The feudal system’s origins can be traced back to late Roman imperial practices of land tenure. The biggest difference between feudal and late Roman practices is the feudal system contained a military obligation in return for holding land.
           The kings and leaders of the early Carolingian empire maintained bands of fighting men known as comitati, these bands of fighting men evolved into the later aristocracy of the Frankish kingdom. In the early eighth century Charles Martel began the practice of granting lands known as benefices to retainers in return for specified terms of military service. These lands were not hereditary at first there retention being conditional on fulfillment of service, but over time they became hereditary.