Well, fear not, o newcomer, for help is at hand, thanks to Professor B.S. Bachrach of the University of Minnesota. Bachrach provides us with an invaluable fixed point, a point de repère as the French would say. In a fluid historical landscape where truth and falsehood, right and wrong, are chimaera we can at least orient ourselves on Bachrach's work, secure in the knowledge that everything he says is wrong. It is a kind of Cartesian point of origin, a historical thinking degree zero, from which any move in any direction will represent a positive step towards understanding.
Bachrach continues to churn out massive tomes about early medieval warfare, accompanied by masses of endnotes containing vicious ad hominem attacks on his critics (largely yours truly). For those who may be taken in I offer this review of an earlier instalment, which appeared in Peritia and is thus perhaps not very widely available. It sets out most of the key objections to his work, objections with which the overwhelming majority of students of the early medieval period would agree. This, however, is not quite my text as published, which was very slightly edited. This is, if you like, the 'director's cut'.]
Bernard S. Bachrach, Early
Carolingian Warfare: Prelude to Empire Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press 2001, xiv + 430 pp. $55.00. ISBN 0-8122-3533-9
Over the last thirty years or so
Bernard S. Bachrach has been painstakingly, indeed fearlessly, building what
might best be termed a parallel early Middle Ages. The names and the events are familiar and the
landscape just about recognisable, yet something is not quite right. In this early Middle Ages, not only did Rome
not die, it never even grew old. Indeed
it became bigger and better than ever before.
The changes that took place in ‘conventional’ late antiquity have little
or no place in this world. Here, the
Roman state was all-powerful; its army an efficient, well-oiled fighting
machine; its towns mighty fortresses.
There is no sign of the corruption and inefficiency, of the negotiation
and bargaining at all levels of government and administration, or of the
economic contraction and urban decay revealed by four decades of sophisticated
documentary and archaeological study of the western Roman Empire in the ‘other’
Late Antiquity. In BachrachWorld,
moreover, this maximal Roman state continued without a break into the
post-Roman period, especially in the field of military affairs. The western kingdoms of the period between c.500
and c.900 commanded well-equipped and numerically enormous standing
armies. In Bachrach’s latest book, the
Carolingian regular army numbers tens of thousands of men drawn from a
‘manpower pool’ of two million, all rigorously trained and disciplined
according to the best Roman theories and supplied by centralised state
workshops. They fight with throwing
spear and stabbing sword, just like Caesar’s legions, and march across the countryside
in step, to the tune of Venantius Fortunatus’ hymns. If only Charlemagne himself could have seen
them!
Were this a work of science
fiction or part of the curiously booming ‘what if’ historical literature it
might be very interesting. Alas it is
not. It is presented, and pretty aggressively
at that, as a serious work of historical scholarship. In fact Bachrach repeatedly stresses that his
is the correct view of the era, dismissing most other current
practitioners of early medieval history, particularly Anglophones and
especially the growing phalanx of those who have dared to criticise his
imaginative reconstructions in the past, as doctrinaire slaves to a
‘primitivist’ agenda. The book begins
with an account of political history – or long-term strategy, as Bachrach calls
it – between the supremacy of the mayor Pippin of Herestal and the coronation
of his grandson Pippin the Short as King Pippin I in 751. The argument is that there was a conscious
and coherent long-term strategy, based upon a knowledge of which areas had once
been governed by the early Merovingians, to reconquer and absorb peripheral
areas into the regnum francorum.
Bachrach then moves on to look at military organisation; the Franks
maintained a huge and highly organised regular army, as mentioned. The book next considers training and
equipment, morale, battlefield tactics, campaigning strategies and ‘naval
assets’.
The problems with the book are
many but most relate to Bachrach’s rather individual modus operandi,
which have repeatedly been criticised in the past. A few causes célèbres relating to the
different chapters (none of which will surprise aficionados of Bachrach’s work)
may suffice. Bachrach reads very widely
in the English and German secondary literature and his knowledge of the primary
sources is extensive. As often as not, a
cited source, if taken absolutely literally and in isolation, does say
what he claims it says. The problem is
that these sources are taken too literally and often out of context. For example, a very brief passage (a handful
of lines) from the epic Waltharius becomes the subject of an extensive
exegesis on cavalry warfare (p.196 ff.).
Leaving aside the problems of the poem’s provenance and purpose, in
Bachrach’s analysis Waltharius’ troop deploys and redeploys from line to column
and back again, all whilst within spear-throwing distance of the enemy, who
(apparently) kindly allow them to continue with this country dancing, never
once attacking them whilst in the middle of their manoeuvres. Nineteenth-century tactical theorists, who
said that any unit that manoeuvred in the face of the enemy was disordered,
would have been astonished. But there
would be no need for their astonishment.
Bachrach has simply translated literally the two synonyms for
battle-line (acies and cuneus) used by the poet. Neither word had such technically precise
usage in the early Middle Ages, and nor did they in classical Latin (as even a
brief perusal of Lewis and Short’s Latin dictionary will rapidly demonstrate). This is indeed an interesting passage but
Bachrach takes his analysis much too far, and the same is true of source after
source.
Another problem concerns the
Frankish political ‘master-plan’.
Bachrach’s reconstruction is based mainly upon the Annales Mettenses
Priores, written well after the close of the period under discussion and,
as has very widely been appreciated, recasting the history of the late seventh
and eighth century as the inevitable and entirely justified, because
divinely-ordained, rise of the Carolingians to control of the whole Frankish
world. Bachrach pays lip-service to this
point but does not allow it to impinge in any way on his argument, which
involves the early Carolingians closely scrutinising the works of Gregory of
Tours and other sources in order to find out the original extent of Merovingian
dominion and then planning a long-term strategy to reconstruct this
polity. Yet at the same time, in the
period studied, they neither retook all of the areas where the Merovingians had
had usually fairly ill-defined hegemony (sixth-century Frankish gains in
northern Italy are the subject of no part of the plan, although admittedly that
could be because these are only vaguely mentioned in less well-known sources
possibly absent from the Carolingians’ Strategic Studies research library), nor
stop at the limits of Merovingian power (thus Septimania was
conquered). The fact of the matter, as
has been clearly revealed in sensitive studies of the Frankish politics of the
period (most recently and notably Paul Fouracre’s The Age of Charles Martel),
is that the regional elites on the periphery of the Frankish world who broke
free of direct Merovingian rule in the course of the seventh century,
nevertheless at the same time became ever more assimilated with the aristocracy
of the kingdom’s heartlands. They
neither achieved nor desired complete independence from Frankish politics but
(and this has long been appreciated) retained close familial and other links
with it, and intervened in Frankish high politics as and when they wished, or
were able to. This fact in itself meant
that in the aristocratic faction politics of the day, Pippinid/Arnulfing
political dominance could never be secure until the dynasty had ensured that
its allies controlled all of the areas of this loosely nit polity. Thus early Carolingian military activity
tended to be drawn out from core to periphery in often piece-meal and usually
contingent fashion.
The chapter on the organisation
of the Frankish army suffers from being based upon almost no sources actually
written in the period under review (c.687-751). The main evidence used is ninth-century
Carolingian capitularies. Bachrach
assumes that the legislation in these documents was generally closely adhered
to in practice. Leaving this
questionable assumption to one side, students of the period (most significantly
the late Timothy Reuter) have long underlined the fact that the absence of
military legislation from the substantial corpus of Charlemagne’s capitularies
before about 800 is unlikely, when compared with the heavy attention devoted to
the subject after that date, to be fortuitous.
Times had changed and there was a greater need for legislation, even if
the precise nature of that change is still a matter for debate. This material cannot, as Reuter said, simply
be projected back into earlier periods.
Other material is drawn from Hincmar of Rheims’ De Ordine Palatii. Bachrach claims that this text was written by
Adalhard of Corbie in the late eighth century (in which case it would still
belong after the era covered by his book).
Hincmar does indeed say that he had copied Adalhard’s work, but the fact
remains that Adalhard’s text is lost and it is quite clear that Hincmar
interpolated his own views to a now unknowable extent. Even recent optimistic interpretations, by
Brigitte Kasten and Janet Nelson, which see this text as essentially
Adalhard’s, push it only to the very end of Charlemagne’s reign, and Hincmar
himself twice claims no greater antiquity for the information contained in it
than the reign of Louis the Pious. The
use made of the text here, where it is claimed to represent an unproblematic
reflection of how things actually were in the eighth century, is perilous to
say the least.
The chapter on equipment and
training takes a similar approach. Here
the source is Hrabanus Maurus’ reworking of Vegetius’ De Re Militari –
once again a mid-ninth-century text which, even if one could accept its
testimony as a faithful description of Carolingian actuality, would relate to
the middle of the ninth century, not the beginning of the eighth. Bachrach’s is in fact a useful survey of the
ways in which Hrabanus modified his source, but the problems are (if you will
excuse the pun) legion. First of all,
the purpose of the text is not closely analysed. Secondly, Hrabanus’ was not the only
reworking of Vegetius in the period; Freculf and Sedulius also produced
versions, rather different from Hrabanus’.
As Paul Kershaw will argue in a forthcoming paper, whilst Freculf and
Hrabanus seem genuinely to have felt their works might be useful for the kings
to whom they addressed them, Sedulius’ is more like unashamedly gleeful
antiquarianism. Recent work has stressed
the authority given by Carolingian writers to classical works, whether or not
they bore any relationship to ninth-century reality. Natalia Lozovsky’s work on geography is a
case in point. Thirdly, the
information contrasts with what we know of Carolingian weaponry from
archaeological sources. Bachrach elides
the gladius mentioned in Hrabanus’ version of Vegetius with the
archaeologically attested scramasax, but the two are different. The two-edged early Roman legionary short
sword (it had largely gone out of use even by Vegetius’ day) was a stabbing
weapon, a usage completely unsuited to the single-edged scramasax which,
especially in its later forms, from the seventh century onwards, was a chopping
weapon. Bachrach dismisses such
comparisons through a pseudo-statistical argument about the smallness of the
archaeological sample (he threatens a whole monograph on archaeological and
pictorial sources in the future), in apparent unawareness of the contradiction
between this point and his own generalisations about actual practice from a
single version (out of at least three different ones) of an ancient text of uncertain
application. Fourthly,
Hrabanus’/Vegetius’ accounts of military practice are quite at variance with
what we know of ninth-century campaigns and battles (see further below). Finally, Vegetius’ was an antiquarian
work even when he wrote it, full of criticisms of ‘modern’ practice and
recommendations about going back to the Good Old Days. There is little or no evidence that the De
Re Militari either adequately described or had any effect on most late
Roman military practice. This alone must have some implications for Bachrach’s
arguments about direct Roman-post-Roman military continuity.
When looking at battlefield
tactics and campaigns Bachrach again often relies on unexpected sources. Apart from the use of Waltharius mentioned
above, he discusses Agathias’ account of a Frankish battle in Italy in the
550s. The precise relevance of this to
early Carolingian warfare is unclear.
Archaeological sources make clear a dramatic shift in the nature of
weaponry around 600, which in turn points to a radical change in tactical
practice away from more open and fluid battlefield usages, involving greater
use of missile weapons, towards a heavier reliance upon what might be termed
shieldwall combat. One of the few even remotely
detailed accounts of a battle from Bachrach’s chosen period, the Chronicle
of 754’s description of the battle of Poitiers, is hugely over-interpreted,
ignoring the biblical resonances in which it is steeped. Otherwise, whenever a source runs contrary to
the clinical Roman science that Bachrach believes Carolingian warfare to have
been (and as soon as we get detailed accounts of warfare with anything like
regularity, in the later ninth century, this is almost always the case),
Bachrach dismisses them as representing the wilful, ideologically-driven
misrepresentation of warfare by churchmen opposed to violence (evading the
point that, as numerous scholars have shown, the church’s attitude to war in
this period was far from being either so clear-cut or so uniformly negative). A more disturbing aspect of Bachrach’s work
is its sanitisation of warfare. The huge
Carolingian military machine moves through the landscape causing barely the
slightest hardship or disruption to the locals, for this would run counter to
the rational purposes of the war and defeat its aims. Similarities with modern euphemisms such as
‘friendly fire’, ‘smart bombs’ and ‘collateral damage’ are doubtless not
coincidental. Indeed the book is fairly
soaked in modern military jargon and seeks to demonstrate that the Carolingians,
like ‘Stormin’ Norman’ Schwarzkopf, were adherents of the doctrine of
overwhelming force. What impact the
‘Rumsfeld doctrine’, of small, highly trained and rapid forces striking
directly at the enemy heartland, will have on military history of the Bachrach
type remains to be seen. One might
suggest that it will result in a picture more easily supported by actual early
medieval evidence…
Bachrach’s attitude to
archaeology resurfaces, not for the first time in his oeuvre, in his discussion
of the economic background to early Carolingian warfare. Decades of archaeological work on the
settlement geography of the period, stressing late Roman decline before
resurgence from the seventh century onwards is dismissed as ‘primitivist’ or
statistically worthless, in favour of works by historians dating from the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Indeed much of the bibliography of the book is very old, though claimed
to retain its value (although given that Bachrach simply dismisses anything
more recent it is difficult to know how he can ascertain this). Bachrach’s methodology, as usual, is to start
from questionable assumptions about Carolingian military capacities, based, as
we have seen, on an idiosyncratic and problematic use of a small range of written
sources, and then extrapolate from this to assert the existence of a
socio-economic base capable of sustaining such military activity, with evidence
hammered to fit. Surely in early
medieval studies one has no option but to work from the known to the
unknown. Although not without its
problems, we have far more data on the social structures, settlement geography
and economic organisation of the early Middle Ages (none of which supports the
Bachrach thesis, which is why he dismisses it as unrepresentative) than on
military actuality. A more reasonable
methodology is therefore to work from this base to reconstruct the levels of
military activity it could support, not vice versa.
Oddly in view of his diatribes
against other researchers, this is not a careful book. Hrabanus is curiously spelt Rhabanus
throughout; the Süntel are rendered ‘Süntal’ (which would imply that they were
a valley rather than a mountain range); even Latin terms, upon which Bachrach
places such heavy weight, are not given correctly – contubernium and castrum
are given as contubernia and castra in the nominative
singular. The prose is leaden; readers
might keep themselves amused by spotting the repetition of key phrases (almost
refrains) like ‘massive army’ and ‘old Roman fortress city’. More seriously, Bachrach repeatedly
completely misrepresents the arguments of his opponents, cases in point being
the supposed ‘primitivism’ of some modern researchers (mercifully, his rants on
this subject here do not come as close to implicit racism as in some of his
other writings), the arguments against the efficiency of Carolingian
legislation, and those about warfare being driven by booty. Even works claimed to support the Bachrach
thesis are misrepresented. The volume is
dedicated to F.-L. Ganshof, whom Bachrach claims as a sort of intellectual
father figure (what Ganshof would have made of this honour is sadly impossible
to know), apparently in the belief that Ganshof (in my view rather harshly
treated by recent scholarship) represents modern paradigms of early medieval
history. Yet Ganshof’s work on the
Carolingian military was quite at odds with Bachrach’s arguments. He thought armies were fairly small and was,
as the discussione after K.-F. Werner’s famous paper on the subject
makes clear, unconvinced by the notion of the 20,000 man army in practice. Bachrach is tacit on this subject, yet takes
historians to task, probably rightly, for misrepresenting Werner (although in
my reading Werner was concerned with theoretical maxima and open to the
objection, put forward by Ganshof, that forces in reality might be as low as
40% of the theoretical totals).
Bachrach’s bugbear, archaeological work on late Roman urban decline
(curiously claimed to represent only a vestige of an outmoded idea), is
inaccurately rendered, although it has almost no relevance to the period being
studied. In opposition to the alleged
(but grossly misrepresented) argument (by this reviewer) that Metz had become a
‘ghost town’, Bachrach cites the construction of a ‘massive cathedral’ within
the walls. We know absolutely nothing
about the size, plan or even the construction materials of the fifth-century
cathedral in Metz, although admittedly it probably was inside the
walls. More to the point, the argument
critiqued here, like most other work on the subject, argues for rapidly growing
and indeed thriving urban centres by the period covered by Bachrach’s book.
This raises what is perhaps a
more important issue. Leaving aside the
point that they largely cite Bachrach’s own earlier outpourings, the extensive
notes (there are 257 pages of text in this volume and 134 pages of endnotes at,
thus, a ratio of over a page of notes to every two pages of text) repeatedly
descend into tirades against his critics.
Indeed this section is, to considerable degree, an extended diatribe
against Ian Wood. Much of the critique
takes the form of unsubstantiated generalised claims about levels of
scholarship, ideas about proof or evidence, and so on. An historian of Bachrach’s age and experience
should know that this runs contrary to academic rules of engagement. If you are going to assert that a scholar has
no idea how to use evidence, you are obliged to back up your claim. As implied above, in order to attack his
critics, Bachrach often deviates considerably from the point under
discussion. One really must ask why the
publishers allowed this over-inflated and self-indulgent use of the endnote
apparatus.
There is no doubting Bachrach’s
intelligence and scholarship; what remains, at best, curious is its funnelling
into an increasingly strident and wilful insistence upon a version of events
which has little or no support in the evidence and which diverges increasingly
from the readings of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages by almost every
other scholar of the period. All told,
it is probably best to file this book under quaint historiographical dead-ends.