Were early medieval armies small warbands or much larger fighting forces? David Bachrach examines the fierce scholarly debate over army size and what it reveals about warfare after the fall of Rome.
By David Bachrach
There is perhaps no topic that is more fraught or which has been the subject of more polemic than the size of campaign armies during the early medieval period. For well over a century, scholars enamored of the “Dark Age” model of early medieval history in its various permutations have insisted that the rulers of the so-called “barbarian” successor regimes in the erstwhile provinces of the Roman Empire were incapable of either maintaining late Roman institutions or of developing their own. This incapacity, so the theory goes, most certainly included military institutions.
The Small Size Proponents
Among the earliest advocates for the small size of early medieval armies was the German military historian Hans Delbrück. Originally a historian of classical warfare, in the third volume of his massive History of War, published in 1907, Delbrück argued that early medieval Europe was an era without military science, by which he meant primarily an era without either effective foot soldiers or logistics. As an originator of the concept of Sachkritik, which can be understood as the study of the material constraints on the conduct of warfare, Delbrück was hyper-focused on the problem of numbers in warfare. He diligently collected data on the claims for large numbers in early medieval sources and argued that chroniclers exaggerated the size of the enemy forces either to gain greater glory for victory or to explain away defeats.
The beginning of Hans Delbrück’s chapter on Charlemagne
By contrast, Delbrück did not dwell on the fact that chroniclers had an equal reason to provide smaller numbers for the “home side”, or seek to explain why some authors, particularly in the Carolingian period, offered large numbers of combatants in their accounts of the armies of Charlemagne even when he was victorious. In short, given his parti pris that early medieval Europe was bereft of military science, Delbrück rejected large numbers and accepted small numbers for early medieval numbers.
Delbrück’s themes regarding the primitive nature and small scale of early medieval warfare were given renewed vigor in scholarly discourse through the publication of L’Art militaire et les armées au moyen âge by the French historian Ferdinand Lot in 1946. Lot made two complementary claims in this work, namely that men serving on foot ceased to have relevance in offensive military campaigns by the eighth century, and that the largest armies assembled, even by Charlemagne, rarely reached 5,000 men. Demonstrating a rather striking cognitive dissonance, however, Lot also stressed that the capture and defense of fortifications played a central role in warfare throughout the medieval millennium. This is a topic to which I will return below.
Many of Lot’s arguments subsequently were reiterated by the Belgian military historian J. F. Verbruggen. While rejecting Delbrück’s claims regarding the lack of military science in the early medieval period – Verbruggen highlighted what he saw as the development of very effective cavalry forces in this period – he nevertheless accepted both the disappearance of effective foot soldiers from warfare and concomitantly the small size of early medieval armies. Verbruggen’s work, which was published originally in Flemish in 1954, finally received widespread attention as a result of Heinrich Sproemberg’s review article of the volume, which was published in German in 1959. In this essay, Sproemberg restated the current scholarly state of the question, praising both Lot and Verbruggen for their conclusions that mounted troops played the central role in medieval warfare, and that armies, particularly in the early medieval period, were small.
The small-army thesis received further support from the publication by the East German scholar Eckhard Müller-Mertens of a Marxist history of the fate of free farmers under Charlemagne and Louis the Pious. Müller-Mertens rejected the model set forth by Delbrück, Lot, and Verbruggen that foot soldiers ceased to play a significant role in warfare by the eighth century. Instead, he argued that the continuous mobilization of foot soldiers by Charlemagne and Louis the Pious in their wars of conquest led to their impoverishment. The end result, he argued, was that only those men wealthy enough to serve on horseback were capable of continuing their military service from the mid-ninth century onward. This model subsequently was taken up during the 1980s and 1990s by Timothy Reuter in support of his small army model.
The Large Size Proponents
The first scholar to argue against the now dominant conception of the small scale of early medieval warfare and early medieval armies was Karl Ferdinand Werner, who also played a pioneering role in arguing for important aspects of institutional continuity between the later Roman Empire and its successor kingdoms. In the 1968 Spoleto volume on warfare in western Europe, Werner severely criticized the dominant approach in the scholarship which focused on decreasing the size of medieval armies simply for the sake of asserting that there were small armies during the Middle Ages.
Werner’s article “Bewaffnung and Waffenbeigabe in der Merowingerzeit,” appears in Ordinamenti militari in occidente nell’alto medioevo
Werner took a largely demographic and economic approach to this question. Through an in-depth analysis of charters and narrative sources, but not material sources developed through archaeology, Werner counted the number of imperial monasteries and estates, as well as bishoprics and counties within the Carolingian Empire during Charlemagne’s reign. After assigning what he considered to be reasonable numbers of fighting men, based on the economic capacities of these institutions, Werner concluded that Charlemagne had the capacity to raise in aggregate 30,000-35,000 heavily armed mounted troops and as many as 100,000 lightly armed mounted troops and foot soldiers in the lands north of the Alps.
These figures, however, were highly controversial and were not widely accepted in their totality either by specialists in military history or by medieval historians in general. From a methodological perspective, Werner did not tie the potentially large size of campaign armies under Charlemagne to specific military objectives that would have required the mobilization of such large forces. In this context, Werner did not argue against the now traditional view that the striking power of the Carolingian army consisted of heavily armed cavalry (loricati) rather than foot soldiers and accepted that foot soldiers largely disappeared from campaign armies during the course of the ninth century.
The major methodological break-through in discussions of the sizes of armies in early medieval Europe came with the recognition that warfare in this period, as Lot had recognized as early as 1946, was dominated by sieges. This reality was evident not only from the much more frequent mention of sieges than battles in narrative works, but also the exponential growth in the volume of information about fortifications that was developed through excavations. This new conception of warfare was first crystalized in 1970 by Bernard Bachrach in his classic study, “Charles Martel, Mounted Shock Combat, the Stirrup and Feudalism”.
Among the earliest applications of this new methodological insight was Nicholas Brooks’ study of Viking attacks in England, published in 1979. Drawing on a range of written sources as well as excavations of Anglo-Saxon and Viking fortifications, Brooks was able to show that Viking armies in the ninth century numbered in the thousands rather than in the hundreds as many earlier scholars had asserted. Subsequently, Bernard Bachrach further developed the large army thesis in numerous articles and books, which took as their starting point the need to mobilize substantial forces of men on foot to undertake the enormous number of sieges that dominated military conflicts in pre-crusade Europe.
Timothy Reuter and Guy Halsall have been the leading figures, in English-language studies, in the rear-guard action in defense of the small army thesis. As mentioned above, Reuter expanded upon the Marxist model first developed by Müller-Mertens. Halsall, for his part, has revived the dark age thesis that dates back to the publications of Delbrück. Notably, throughout their numerous works, both Reuter and Halsall, as well as those scholars following in their lead, assiduously avoid addressing the centrality of sieges in early medieval warfare, and the concomitant need for large armies, effective logistical systems, and administrative complexity. They often focus instead on the supposed importance of raiding and collecting booty as social and political lubricants that allowed the ruler to maintain his preeminent place among the “warrior nobility.” However, the publication by Leif Inge Ree Petersen in 2013 of his mammoth study of siege warfare in the later Roman Empire and all its successor regions, including a 400 page catalogue of individual sieges, leaves no room for any further dispute about the main focus of warfare in early medieval Europe.
The time is now long past that scholars should give heed to Werner’s admonition from 1968 that the goal of the historian should not be to find ever smaller armies, but rather to develop techniques for discovering the actual sizes of the armies in question. This approach requires the rejection of a priori assumptions about the poverty and primitivism of early medieval Europe, and a focus on what military leaders were attempting to accomplish. In addition, historians must integrate into their work the enormous volume of information that archaeologists have developed through excavations that massively expands what we can know about the conduct of war.
David Bachrach is a Professor at the University of New Hampshire, where he researches medieval military history, particularly in England and Germany.
Heinrich Sproemberg, “Die Feudale Kriegskunst,” in Beiträge zur belgisch-niederländischen Geschichte III: Forschungen zur mittelalterliche Geschichte (Berlin, 1959), 30-55.
Bernard S. Bachrach, “Charles Martel, Mounted Shock Combat, the Stirrup and Feudalism,” Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History 7 (1970), 49-75, and reprinted with the same pagination in idem, Armies and Politics in the Early Medieval West (Aldershot, 1993).
Nicholas Brooks, “England in the Ninth Century: Crucible of Defeat,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 5th series 29 (1979), 1-20
Were early medieval armies small warbands or much larger fighting forces? David Bachrach examines the fierce scholarly debate over army size and what it reveals about warfare after the fall of Rome.
By David Bachrach
There is perhaps no topic that is more fraught or which has been the subject of more polemic than the size of campaign armies during the early medieval period. For well over a century, scholars enamored of the “Dark Age” model of early medieval history in its various permutations have insisted that the rulers of the so-called “barbarian” successor regimes in the erstwhile provinces of the Roman Empire were incapable of either maintaining late Roman institutions or of developing their own. This incapacity, so the theory goes, most certainly included military institutions.
The Small Size Proponents
Among the earliest advocates for the small size of early medieval armies was the German military historian Hans Delbrück. Originally a historian of classical warfare, in the third volume of his massive History of War, published in 1907, Delbrück argued that early medieval Europe was an era without military science, by which he meant primarily an era without either effective foot soldiers or logistics. As an originator of the concept of Sachkritik, which can be understood as the study of the material constraints on the conduct of warfare, Delbrück was hyper-focused on the problem of numbers in warfare. He diligently collected data on the claims for large numbers in early medieval sources and argued that chroniclers exaggerated the size of the enemy forces either to gain greater glory for victory or to explain away defeats.
By contrast, Delbrück did not dwell on the fact that chroniclers had an equal reason to provide smaller numbers for the “home side”, or seek to explain why some authors, particularly in the Carolingian period, offered large numbers of combatants in their accounts of the armies of Charlemagne even when he was victorious. In short, given his parti pris that early medieval Europe was bereft of military science, Delbrück rejected large numbers and accepted small numbers for early medieval numbers.
Delbrück’s themes regarding the primitive nature and small scale of early medieval warfare were given renewed vigor in scholarly discourse through the publication of L’Art militaire et les armées au moyen âge by the French historian Ferdinand Lot in 1946. Lot made two complementary claims in this work, namely that men serving on foot ceased to have relevance in offensive military campaigns by the eighth century, and that the largest armies assembled, even by Charlemagne, rarely reached 5,000 men. Demonstrating a rather striking cognitive dissonance, however, Lot also stressed that the capture and defense of fortifications played a central role in warfare throughout the medieval millennium. This is a topic to which I will return below.
Many of Lot’s arguments subsequently were reiterated by the Belgian military historian J. F. Verbruggen. While rejecting Delbrück’s claims regarding the lack of military science in the early medieval period – Verbruggen highlighted what he saw as the development of very effective cavalry forces in this period – he nevertheless accepted both the disappearance of effective foot soldiers from warfare and concomitantly the small size of early medieval armies. Verbruggen’s work, which was published originally in Flemish in 1954, finally received widespread attention as a result of Heinrich Sproemberg’s review article of the volume, which was published in German in 1959. In this essay, Sproemberg restated the current scholarly state of the question, praising both Lot and Verbruggen for their conclusions that mounted troops played the central role in medieval warfare, and that armies, particularly in the early medieval period, were small.
The small-army thesis received further support from the publication by the East German scholar Eckhard Müller-Mertens of a Marxist history of the fate of free farmers under Charlemagne and Louis the Pious. Müller-Mertens rejected the model set forth by Delbrück, Lot, and Verbruggen that foot soldiers ceased to play a significant role in warfare by the eighth century. Instead, he argued that the continuous mobilization of foot soldiers by Charlemagne and Louis the Pious in their wars of conquest led to their impoverishment. The end result, he argued, was that only those men wealthy enough to serve on horseback were capable of continuing their military service from the mid-ninth century onward. This model subsequently was taken up during the 1980s and 1990s by Timothy Reuter in support of his small army model.
The Large Size Proponents
The first scholar to argue against the now dominant conception of the small scale of early medieval warfare and early medieval armies was Karl Ferdinand Werner, who also played a pioneering role in arguing for important aspects of institutional continuity between the later Roman Empire and its successor kingdoms. In the 1968 Spoleto volume on warfare in western Europe, Werner severely criticized the dominant approach in the scholarship which focused on decreasing the size of medieval armies simply for the sake of asserting that there were small armies during the Middle Ages.
Werner took a largely demographic and economic approach to this question. Through an in-depth analysis of charters and narrative sources, but not material sources developed through archaeology, Werner counted the number of imperial monasteries and estates, as well as bishoprics and counties within the Carolingian Empire during Charlemagne’s reign. After assigning what he considered to be reasonable numbers of fighting men, based on the economic capacities of these institutions, Werner concluded that Charlemagne had the capacity to raise in aggregate 30,000-35,000 heavily armed mounted troops and as many as 100,000 lightly armed mounted troops and foot soldiers in the lands north of the Alps.
These figures, however, were highly controversial and were not widely accepted in their totality either by specialists in military history or by medieval historians in general. From a methodological perspective, Werner did not tie the potentially large size of campaign armies under Charlemagne to specific military objectives that would have required the mobilization of such large forces. In this context, Werner did not argue against the now traditional view that the striking power of the Carolingian army consisted of heavily armed cavalry (loricati) rather than foot soldiers and accepted that foot soldiers largely disappeared from campaign armies during the course of the ninth century.
The major methodological break-through in discussions of the sizes of armies in early medieval Europe came with the recognition that warfare in this period, as Lot had recognized as early as 1946, was dominated by sieges. This reality was evident not only from the much more frequent mention of sieges than battles in narrative works, but also the exponential growth in the volume of information about fortifications that was developed through excavations. This new conception of warfare was first crystalized in 1970 by Bernard Bachrach in his classic study, “Charles Martel, Mounted Shock Combat, the Stirrup and Feudalism”.
Among the earliest applications of this new methodological insight was Nicholas Brooks’ study of Viking attacks in England, published in 1979. Drawing on a range of written sources as well as excavations of Anglo-Saxon and Viking fortifications, Brooks was able to show that Viking armies in the ninth century numbered in the thousands rather than in the hundreds as many earlier scholars had asserted. Subsequently, Bernard Bachrach further developed the large army thesis in numerous articles and books, which took as their starting point the need to mobilize substantial forces of men on foot to undertake the enormous number of sieges that dominated military conflicts in pre-crusade Europe.
Timothy Reuter and Guy Halsall have been the leading figures, in English-language studies, in the rear-guard action in defense of the small army thesis. As mentioned above, Reuter expanded upon the Marxist model first developed by Müller-Mertens. Halsall, for his part, has revived the dark age thesis that dates back to the publications of Delbrück. Notably, throughout their numerous works, both Reuter and Halsall, as well as those scholars following in their lead, assiduously avoid addressing the centrality of sieges in early medieval warfare, and the concomitant need for large armies, effective logistical systems, and administrative complexity. They often focus instead on the supposed importance of raiding and collecting booty as social and political lubricants that allowed the ruler to maintain his preeminent place among the “warrior nobility.” However, the publication by Leif Inge Ree Petersen in 2013 of his mammoth study of siege warfare in the later Roman Empire and all its successor regions, including a 400 page catalogue of individual sieges, leaves no room for any further dispute about the main focus of warfare in early medieval Europe.
The time is now long past that scholars should give heed to Werner’s admonition from 1968 that the goal of the historian should not be to find ever smaller armies, but rather to develop techniques for discovering the actual sizes of the armies in question. This approach requires the rejection of a priori assumptions about the poverty and primitivism of early medieval Europe, and a focus on what military leaders were attempting to accomplish. In addition, historians must integrate into their work the enormous volume of information that archaeologists have developed through excavations that massively expands what we can know about the conduct of war.
David Bachrach is a Professor at the University of New Hampshire, where he researches medieval military history, particularly in England and Germany.
Click here to read more from David Bachrach
Further Readings:
Heinrich Sproemberg, “Die Feudale Kriegskunst,” in Beiträge zur belgisch-niederländischen Geschichte III: Forschungen zur mittelalterliche Geschichte (Berlin, 1959), 30-55.
Bernard S. Bachrach, “Charles Martel, Mounted Shock Combat, the Stirrup and Feudalism,” Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History 7 (1970), 49-75, and reprinted with the same pagination in idem, Armies and Politics in the Early Medieval West (Aldershot, 1993).
Nicholas Brooks, “England in the Ninth Century: Crucible of Defeat,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 5th series 29 (1979), 1-20
Leif Inge Ree Petersen, Siege Warfare and Military Organization in the Successor States (400-800 AD): Byzantium, the West, and Islam (Leiden, 2013).
Top Image: A scene from the Stuttgart Psalter – Württembergische Landesbibliothek Cod.bibl.fol.23 fol. 3v
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