1st Edition
Medieval Warfare: Technology, Military Revolutions, and Strategy
This volume explores the topics of military revolutions, strategy, and tactics both separately and as they relate to each other. It makes important contributions to understanding European warfare in the Early, High, and especially the Late Middle Ages, as well the military transition to the Early Modern Period.
Readers will find detailed analysis of how technological and non-technological developments interacted to effect major changes in how wars were fought across the period. The evolution and capabilities of the English longbow and of early gunpowder artillery are examined in depth. Changes in the tools of war naturally affected plans to employ those tools to achieve political ends—military strategy—but strategy was never dictated by technology. That point is illustrated by examinations of English efforts to conquer Wales; the Anglo-Burgundian alliance of the late Hundred Years War; and the economic factors shaping medieval conquests in general.
The nine studies in the volume have all been published previously, but a new introduction shows how they fit together, particularly explaining how they collectively rebut common critiques of Rogers’s controversial thesis that European warfare was reshaped by the Infantry and Artillery Revolutions during the era of the Hundred Years’ War. Two of the chapters have been substantially expanded, so that the versions printed here should be the ones consulted and cited in the future by scholars of medieval warfare and military revolutions.
Technology and Military Revolutions
1. “The Idea of Military Revolutions in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Texts,” Revista de História das Ideias 30 (2009): 395-415.
2. “Carolingian Cavalry in Battle: The Evidence Reconsidered,” in Crusading and Warfare in the Middle Ages: Realities and Representations. Essays in Honour of John France, ed. Simon John and Nicolas Morton (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), 1-11.
3. “The Longbow, the Infantry Revolution, and Technological Determinism (Expanded Version),” originally pubished in a shorter version in The Journal of Medieval History 37 (2011): 321-341.
4. “The Artillery and Artillery Fortress Revolutions Revisited,” in Nicolas Prouteau, Emmanuel de Crouy-Chanel and Nicolas Faucherre, eds., Artillerie et Fortification, 1200-1600 (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2011): 75-80.
5. “Gunpowder Artillery in Europe, 1326-1500: Innovation and Impact,” in Robert S. Ehlers, Jr.; Sarah K. Douglas; and Daniel P. M. Curzon, eds., Technology, Violence and War. Essays in Honor of John F. Guilmartin, Jr. (Leiden: Brill, 2019): 39-71.
6. ““Tactics and the Face of Battle, 1350-1750,” shorter version originally published as “Tactics and the Face of Battle,” in Frank Tallett and D.J.B. Trim, eds. European Warfare, 1350-1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010): 203-235.
Strategy
7. “Giraldus Cambrensis, Edward I, and the Conquest of Wales,” in Successful Strategies. Triumphing in War and Peace from Antiquity to the Present, ed. Williamson Murray and Richard Hart Sinnreich (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 2014), 65-99.
8. “The Anglo-Burgundian Alliance and Grand Strategy in the Hundred Years War,” Grand Strategy and Military Alliances, ed. Peter R. Mansoor and Williamson Murray (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016): 216-253.
9. “Medieval Strategy and the Economics of Conquest,” The Journal of Military History 82 (2018): 709-38.
Biography
Clifford J. Rogers is a Professor of History and co-Director of the Digital History Center at West Point. He is the author, editor, or co-editor of thirteen books, and twenty volumes of the Journal of Medieval Military History. His work has been honored with a Society for Military History Distinguished Book Award, Moncado Prize, and digital military history award; the Royal Historical Society Alexander Prize; three Army Historical Foundation Distinguished Writing Awards; two Verbruggen book prizes and the Bachrach Medal from De Re Militari; and the USMA Dean’s Award for Career Teaching Excellence.
