This Handbook provides the first comprehensive and global analysis of medieval military strategy, covering the period from the sixth to the seventeenth century.
This Handbook provides the first comprehensive and global analysis of medieval military strategy, covering the period from the sixth to the seventeenth century.
Challenging the widely held notion in modern strategic studies that medieval strategy was non-existent, the Handbook brings together leading scholars to explore a range of literatures, campaigns, laws, and contexts that highlight medieval warfares multifaceted contours. The scope of the work is ambitious, with over 30 chapters dedicated to analysing strategy across six continents. From Charlemagne to Henry V and Scandinavia to Florence; southbound to Morocco then across the Sahara to Kongo; past the Adriatic to Byzantium and Georgia and the Crusades and Egypt; further still into Indian and Chinese dynasties and Japan; and finally, to Central and South Americathis Handbook provides ready access to military strategy across the medieval world stage. In the process, it fills a significant gap in the history of strategy and serves to connect the ancient world with the modern, demonstrating thatwhatever the periodmilitary leaders have consistently plied warfare in the pursuit of greater ends.
This Handbook will be of much interest to researchers and students of military strategy, medieval military history, and strategic studies in general.
Introduction Part I: Europe
1. Charlemagnes Long-Term Strategic Goal:
Obtaining the Imperial Title in the West
2. Anglo-Saxon and Viking Military
Strategies
3. Grand Strategy of the Ottonian Empire, 919-973
4. Strategy in
the High Middle Ages: Anglo-Normans, Capetians and Plantagenets
5.
Insurgency: Unconventional Strategy in the West, 500-1300
6. The Continuous
Crusade in Northeast Europe: Warfare in Livonia, Estonia, Prussia and
Lithuania, 1198-1411
7. Military Professionalization and Strategy in Late
Medieval England
8. Beyond the Town Walls: Economy and the Florentine Forces,
1336-1392
9. The Origins of National Navies in the West
10. Strategy and
Military Revolutions Part II: The Mediterranean
11. Strategy and Grand
Strategy: Resources, Geopolitics and Ideology in the East Roman/Byzantine
Empire
12. Maurice and His Legacy: Strategike in the Byzantine Military
Manuals
13. The Fatimids and Syria
14. The Crusades: Western Armies and
Eastern Strategies
15. The Rule of the Temple and the Military-Religious
Orders
16. Raiding as a Strategy in Medieval Georgia
17. Spains Leading
Thirteenth-Century Law Code and (Incidental) Military Treatise Las Siete
Partidas
18. Ottomans: Mehmed the Conqueror Part III: Asia and Africa
19.
Beyond and Behind the Wall: Siege Warfare of Sui-Tang China, 600-900
20.
China in the Gunpowder Age, Song to Ming Dynasties
21. Strategy and Warfare
in Ancient and Medieval Japan
22. Strategies in Post-Gupta India
23. Strategy
of the Delhi Sultanate, 1206-1526
24. Strategy and the Mughal Empire
25.
Strategy in the Mongol Way of War
26. Almoravid Tactics and Strategy
27. The
Kingdom of Ethiopia Shall Live Forever: Military Strategies in Ethiopia
(13th-16th Centuries)
28. Military Strategies in Pre-17th Century West Africa
29. The Military-Political Strategy of the Medieval Kingdom of Kongo Part IV:
Western Hemisphere
30. The Excan tlatoloyan and Military Strategies for
Mesoamerican Control in the Late Post-Classic Period
31. Late Andean Warfare:
Evolving Military Sophistication under the Inka
32. Medieval Strategy:
Conclusions and New Directions
John D. Hosler is a Professor of Military History at the Command and General Staff College. He is the author, most recently, of Jerusalem Falls: Seven Centuries of War and Peace (Yale UP), and is the editor of Seven Myths of Military History (Hackett).
Daniel P. Franke is an Associate Professor of History at Richard Bland College of William & Mary in Petersburg, Virginia. He specializes in the military history of Germany and England and is currently completing a study of Frederick Barbarossa as a military commander.
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