War, preparation for war, and dealing with war’s aftermath consumed the greater part of the surplus resources of societies around the globe throughout the pre-modern period. Military matters affected men, women, and children alike, as direct participants in organized violence, as the victims of conflicts, or through broad-based impositions on ostensibly civilian populations in cash, kind, and labor. Warfare in the Global Middle Ages illuminates the organization and conduct of war as well as the impact of warfare on societies in Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas across a long millennium spanning from the third century CE to the sixteenth century CE.
The volume is organized in eight chapters, which address the current state of scholarship regarding warfare over this long period, the source materials available to scholars to investigate the myriad questions related to this broad field, and the institutions developed by societies to defend themselves and engage in wars of conquest, military technology, the logistics of war, the education and training of military leaders and individual combatants, as well as strategy, military intelligence, and diplomacy. The authors argue that an analysis of these topics illuminates broad similarities among polities across the globe, the transmission of ideas and technologies on a regional and global level, and also important differences in the ways that societies responded to similar challenges.
This work is intended broadly both for specialists in the history of warfare across the globe, for an interested lay public, as well as for use in the classroom.
Table of Contents:
Part 1
Toward a Global History of Warfare: A Reconnaissance in Force
Chapter 1
Warfare in the Medieval World: Approaches, Challenges, and Where We Stand
Chapter 2
Writing the History of Warfare in the Global Middle Ages: The Problem of Sources
Part 2
Who Serves in War
Chapter 3
Obligations and Institutions for Local Defense
Chapter 4
Military Organization for Offensive Warfare
Excursus
Women in Combat
Excursus
Military Compensation in a Global Perspective or the Fallacy of “Feudalism”
Part 3
Sinews of War
Chapter 5
Military Technology: A Dynamic of Development, Diffusion, and Conservatism
Chapter 6
Military Logistics
Excursus
Torsion Engine Controversy
Part 4
Preparing for War
Chapter 7
Military Education and Training
Chapter 8
Planning, Strategy, and Military Intelligence
Excursus
Training Elephants
Conclusion
Bibliography
