Warfare in the Global Middle Ages

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.

David S. Bachrach is a professor of medieval European history at the University of New Hampshire, USA. His research focuses on the administrative and military history of the Carolingian Empire, the early medieval kingdom of Germany, as well as the kingdom of England in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. His recent publications include Foundations of Royal Power in Early Medieval Germany (2022); Bruno of Merseburg’s Saxon War: Translation and Commentary (2022) and Warfare in Medieval Europe c. 400-c.1453, 2nd edition (2021), both with Bernard S. Bachrach; and Administration and Organization of War in Thirteenth-Century England (2020).

Bernard S. Bachrach (1939–2023), a fellow of the Medieval Academy, was a specialist in the military history of medieval Europe and spent his 56-year career as a professor at the University of Minnesota, USA. A prolific scholar, he published more than 130 scholarly articles and 20 books, including Merovingian Military Organization (1972), Early Medieval Jewish Policy in Western Europe (1977), Fulk Nerra: The Neo-Roman Consul, 987–1040: A Political Biography of the Angevin Count (1993), Early Carolingian Warfare: Prelude to Empire (2001), Charlemagne's Early Campaigns (768–777): A Diplomatic and Military Analysis (2013), and Warfare in Medieval Europe c.400–c.1453 (2017), with David S. Bachrach.