Opinion
Words
and Swords: A
Samizdat on Medieval Military History and the Decolonization of the Academy
Ken Mondschein (ken at kenmondschein dot com)
The
past two years have seen a growth of a movement, notably amongst our colleagues
in literature but with the support of many in other disciplines, to “decolonize” the practice of medieval studies. This includes
de-centering Europe, and especially northern Europe, as a locus of study;
challenging narratives of a white, male, Christian Middle Ages perpetuated by
white, male, Christian historians; considering critical race and gender theory
in our work; and rejecting earlier historiography as supporting systemic racism
and imperialism. While this movement is partly a culmination of long-brewing
changes, it is also a reaction to the emergence of the alt-right and its use of
medieval symbolism. Dorothy Kim, in her influential essay “Teaching
Medieval Studies in a Time of White Supremacy,” has said, “medieval
studies is intimately entwined with white supremacy and has been so for a long
time… objective neutrality… no longer works, because it facilitates white
supremacists.” In other words,
we have no choice but to engage in this work: to not do so is to
implicitly support injustice. No matter what one’s own politics or position on
the matter, this debate has become the historiographical question of the moment,
and it is part of our professional responsibilities as historians to be au courant on these ideas.
As
someone who is paid to teach all eras of “Western Civilization” and “World
History” to undergraduates; who educates students of all colors, genders, and
sexualities both in the classroom and in the fencing salle; who is committed to
social justice both within and without the academy; who readily engages with
nonacademic communities such as fandom and reenactors; who is worried about the
use of my subjects of study by those who would like to return to an imagined age
of European ethnostates; and who, as a Jew, is personally targeted by alt-right
ideologies, I believe that understanding the arguments made by our colleagues,
as crystallized in the essays published by the Medievalists of Color group and
the In the Medieval Middle blog, is an imperative. I would like to
suggest in this brief essay that we medieval military historians not only
should pay attention—for our field can easily be seen as old-fashioned or even
reactionary—but also that we have much to contribute to this effort. In fact, I
would argue that in many cases, we are already doing consonant work. Further, I
would like to suggest that an “intersectional”
perspective could provide a useful tool for us to explore some of the core
questions in our field in new and interesting ways. Thus, even as I question
some of the approaches taken by previous generations (and their larger
implications), I will also defend the value of some traditional subjects of
study and their ability to contribute to the overall aims of “decolonization.”
Interactions
between different peoples and cultures are not always peaceful, and students of
the Middle Ages must be aware of this unfortunate fact. The medieval world, as
Robert Bartlett points out in his Making of Europe, was created on the
frontiers, and often through violent processes. From the Carolingian empire to
the Crusades to the German Drang nach Osten,
“Europe” was formed through the conquest and Christianization of new lands and
enfolding these into a worldview that unified the socio-economic, the moral,
the historical, and the cosmological. If we are to ask if the migration era was
a violent swamping of Christian Rome with “foreign barbarians,” a more-or-less
peaceful merging of cultures, or if the truth lies in some middle ground
between these, then continuity of military institutions from antiquity to the
Carolingian world, and armed response to migrants, give us key data points with
which to answer the question. The rise of Carolingian social-military
structures is worth studying, as well: it parallels that of the associated
worldview of Latin Christendom, which in turn transformed over the ages and was
carried along with successive waves of colonizers from the Carolingian conquest
of Saxony to the Norman conquests to the Crusades (including the Baltic and
Albigensian Crusades) and the Reconquista. A significant part of medieval
warfare was also driven by slave-taking, and this has likewise become part of
the historiography (see, for instance, the various recent works by David Wyatt
and John Gillingham). If we are to understand imperialism and exploitation of
subject peoples, and the ideology that justifies it, we can not neglect the
Norman conquest of Wales and Ireland or the subjection of Livonia any more than
we can neglect the Spanish conquest of the Americas or the Belgian Congo, as
they are all linked in a long history of thought, institutions, and ideas. Just
as historians of the latter subjects should appreciate the importance of our
work for their areas of concern, so those of us working on the former topics
need to take account of the new scholarship on modern imperialism, which can
provide us with invaluable perspectives, questions, methodological examples,
and theoretical frameworks.
The
Crusades in particular were not only a military venture—and one whose memory is
deployed by both latter-day white nationalists and the Islamic State—but also
incubators of social exchange and transformation that enabled the exchange of
new methods of craft production, economic and social administration, and other
cultural products. The work of medieval military historians on the Crusader
states, the Reconquista, and the Norman conquest of Sicily, Apulia and Calabria
show that medieval society was indeed “diverse,”
that “the Mediterranean” is a valid term of analysis, and that we cannot
consider Europe in isolation. The most interesting history frequently happens
in liminal zones, and, as D. K. Fieldhouse noted for modern imperialism, it was
often that the colonial tail wagged the metropolitan dog. Whether we can say
the same for the Middle Ages is an open research question.
Medieval
military historians necessarily take a transcultural view of such interactions.
We have long used Greek and Arabic sources: studying Byzantine-Latin and
Muslim-Christian interactions shows us how different cultures saw one another
and reached accommodation and how the struggle of would-be conquerors and
resisters, often beginning with xenophobia, led to mutual respect,
accommodation, and, if not tolerance, at least convivencia. What is more, some of the advances of the Muslim
world were seen as highly desirable by northern Europeans and were readily
adopted. Indeed, we medieval military historians have long evaluated these
encounters in a non-judgmental, nonpartisan way that would frustrate any white
nationalist who bothered to do any research deeper than looking at memes on the
Internet. From there, it is but a small step to include a postcolonial approach
that looks at the effects of these interactions on both colonizers and
colonized. Asking questions such as “how is a Welsh archer fighting for the
English crown like, or unlike, a Sepoy?” can only enrich our understanding of
our subject of study.
At
the same time, we must recognize many of the subjects beloved of medieval
military historians might be considered as implicitly supporting a teleology of
European hegemony. These include the history of technology, the growth of
nation-states, and the study of knighthood and chivalry. I am not saying that
these histories cannot be written, only that we must be sensitive to the
“intertwining” of such subjects with a narrative of white supremacy. On the
other hand, exploring how European global hegemony came to be, if done
mindfully, can be a valuable part of critiquing it.
For
instance, the history of military technology can be of value for elucidating a
diverse Middle Ages. One brief example: Migration-era and early medieval
Scandinavians—“Vikings”—greatly valued the advanced metalcraft of the Near
East, and swords of “Damascus steel”
are common archeological finds. Norsemen were also great travelers, serving,
for instance, as the Byzantine Emperor’s Varangian Guard. This provides
concrete evidence that the glories of the “white” Viking age were no such
thing: to the contrary, Scandinavians were acutely aware of their marginal and
impoverished status on the edge of the known world.
The
ideas of chivalry, just war, and rightful conduct of war (jus in bello) inform the history of our own moral systems and
cast light on modern conflicts. Were these steps towards a modern system of
ethics, or a “bro code” that allowed privileged
men to act with impunity? The primary literature is filled with just such
questions, but what meaning did these debates have in their own context? The
works of John Gillingham, Matthew Strickland, and Richard Kaeuper, to name
three eminent historians, speak to these important issues. But these works
cannot be read in isolation: Ruth Mazo Karras has shown how we cannot approach
the history of chivalry without considering the social construction of
masculinity. Gender studies has given us invaluable tools for the study of
chivalry, such that any recent work on the subject would seem incomplete without
considering this vantage.
Moreover,
telling women’s stories has long been an integral part of the work of studying
medieval military history. The work of Valerie Eads, Helen Nicholson, Megan
McLaughlin, and others have shown that women were an integral part of this core
activity of medieval society. Sichelgaita of Salerno, Mathilda of Tuscany, and
Eleanor of Aquitaine were all women of power who, far more than just “holding
down the castle” while their husbands were away, enacted their own political aspirations
through military means. So, too, were women without privileged birth part of,
and indeed key to, medieval armies. The military history of the Middle Ages is
not only one of knights, kings, and queens, but also one of “ordinary” women
who did the gendered labor without which these ventures could not have
functioned—and who could take up arms or participated in siege works when the
need arose.
However,
other areas of study and methodologies are inherently problematic. One of the
major historiographical subtexts of medieval military history is the top-down formation
of nation-states, particularly in the Hundred Years’ War. The specific
argument, as made by Clifford Rogers and others, is that the need to more
effectively govern and organize territorial units for greater military
effectiveness contributed to more centralized states. Medieval military
historians thus seek to contribute to a discourse that is ultimately rooted in
nineteenth-century nationalist discourses, and which sees this development as teleologically
inevitable and desirable. To be sure, this is a complex issue, and one in which
intent and outcomes are muddied. For instance, Daniel Franke was quite correct
in his December 18, 2017 response to Carol Symes on the AHA website that,
concerning the Monumenta Germaniae Historica, “German ‘nationalism’ had no fixed trajectory after Napoleon” and that
“the MGH [was] squarely at odds with the growing tide of central European
anti-Semitism.” However, he missed the point: Symes did not critique the MGH
authors’ anti-Semitism, or lack thereof, but rather that they sought to
“construct the nationalist narratives that bolstered the claims to territory,
patrimony, and sovereignty on which 19th-century European states and aspiring
states depended.” In other words, their intent didn’t matter; it was the overall episteme they
supported. The postmodern argument, deriving from Benedict Anderson’s seminal
1983 work Imagined Communities, is
that the modern nation-state itself is an inherently racist, exclusionary
construct. Writing its history in a manner that does not take these ideas into
account is therefore problematic.
This
is why my fellow students and I in a graduate seminar I took during my doctoral
program at Fordham found the historiography of the Haskins lineage so
troublesome—that is, the work of the line of eminent historians trained by Charles
Homer Haskins, including Lynn White, Jr. and Joseph Strayer, and Strayer’s own
student William Chester Jordan. Strayer does not consider in his Medieval Origins of the Modern State that
the Normans might have been influenced by the more sophisticated societies of
the Mediterranean; rather, it is the northern Europeans—specifically the French
and English—who were the torchbearers of civilization. In his consultancy for the CIA
during the period when the agency was working to outmaneuver the Soviet Union
by destabilizing national governments, Strayer was picking up the thread of
thought that his frustrated mentor Haskins had left dangling after the
disastrous post-Versailles tapestry of Europe had been woven—basing an order
for the present in a particular conception of the past. Strayer may have had the noblest ends and was
a noted opponent of authoritarianism, but, like the MGH authors, he was
part of a regime of power-knowledge that led to numerous injustices and
atrocities.
However,
the situation is far more complex than can be covered in a Modern Global
History seminar; sometimes there are no
good answers; and there are numerous well-intentioned people in the State
Department who see the situation with all of its nuance, who nonetheless
persist in trying to build a more prosperous and peaceful planet, and who view
our work with interest. Such work, however well-intentioned, can still benefit
from the perspective of critical theory: For instance, when we read Jordan’s Women
and Credit in Pre-Industrial and Developing Societies in a graduate seminar at Fordham, one of my
fellows pointed out that chronologically separate societies are not
commensurate: Africa could not develop as Europe did as it had no Africa to
loot, and that the artificial nation-states carved onto the African map by
colonizing powers are not the slightly more organic nation-states of Europe;
for my part, I pointed out that it is a fallacy to think of “modernity” and “progress” being a single arrow that points
inevitably to one teleological result.
I
would argue that the history of state-formation can (and should) be written in
such a way that it is not foreign to an intersectional view of medieval
history—and in fact, I think that it is necessary to do so. Even if we condemn
the Westphalian nation-state as a racist, imperialist construct, it remains an
indisputable fact that such political units are a part of our geopolitical
landscape. The United Nations is composed of representatives of nation-states,
and the decisions made by national leaders affect billions. The
Israel-Palestine conflict, for instance, is essentially one of national
sovereignty. Knowing how these political units came to be can inform not only
more ecumenical, more just state-building in the world today—efforts that will
hopefully reduce the overall amount of violence, corruption, and human
misery—but help explain the origins of, and expiate the effects of, modern
imperialism. These new ways of asking questions are not a substitute for
scholarly rigor—rather, they complement it. Intersectional and postcolonial
theory can help us ask good questions, suggest methods for answering questions
we didn’t think could be answered well, or see gaps and topics we have
previously overlooked.
Furthermore,
at the same time as we recognize some subjects as problematic, we must also
recognize that many of the other subjects we study—the military orders,
fight-books, chivalry and knighthood—are of interest to the alt-right. Though
probably less appealing to white supremacists than the Third Reich, these
subjects can, as Dorothy Kim puts it, still be “weaponized.” Yet, they are also
of interest to vast numbers of random laypersons. My own subject—historical
fencing treatises—appeals to many who see such works as artifacts of an
autochthonous Christian European culture (despite evidence of Jewish and
African masters), as well as numerous people who simply like to swordfight. If
we do not write the histories of these subjects, we leave a blank page for the
popular imagination to inscribe what it will. The history will then be written
by those who do not consider the broader perspective and who reject the more
inclusive narratives we support. I would therefore exhort my colleagues not to
neglect the traditional questions, but rather to bring a new eye to them and to
write with greater sensitivity to questions of race and gender. I would also
exhort us—as medieval military historians have long done—to continue to sortie
forth from the Ivory Tower and bring our educational campaign to the wider
audience of popular history enthusiasts, re-enactors, and K-12 educators.
Finally,
I would like to point out that question is not just how we do our scholarship,
but how we interact with living people today, including our colleagues. At the
2018 Medieval Academy meeting, Geraldine Heng called for more diversity in
creating conference panels, choosing authors for edited publications, and the
selection of plenary speakers. As she pointed out, a conference panel that
seeks to address Othering but consists entirely of white males is troublesome.
(And, contrary to what I once said, a joke about it is not “harmless social
lubricant,” but deeply harmful in that it trivializes the uphill battle faced
by scholars of color.) Unfortunately, it is an inescapable fact that studying
medieval military history, like studying medieval history in general, is a bit
of a ludicrous career choice: it helps to already have a backpack full of
privilege to go into this field. My own students of color, I have observed,
tend to be more interested in practical career choices such as medicine, law,
and business. It is an inescapable fact that the sub-discipline of medieval
military history is, as the kids say these days, “so white.” It has also by and
large been male, though there are many excellent female scholars in this field
such as Valerie Eads, Theresa Vann, Helen Nicholson, and Anne Curry, and De Re
Militari has seen a balance of genders in the speakers it has invited to speak in
its lecture series over the past few years.
While
we cannot go down to the Agora and rope reluctant women or scholars of color
into our professional activities, nonetheless, it is incumbent upon us to, as
the Medievalists of Color say in their Collective Statement, take the
opportunity “to understand the perspectives and experiences of medievalists and
other people of color.” This is doubly so if we are to write postcolonial,
intersectionalist histories. I ask my colleagues to engage, to listen, and accept
that the people best equipped to imagine Otherness are the ones who have
themselves been Othered in our society. We can solve the seemingly insolvable
problem by inviting scholars who work on other periods and places to provide
needed perspective. Diverse perspectives can only make our work stronger. I
have included some suggestions for avenues of investigation—weapons technology
as cultural exchange, Welsh archers and Sepoys, Jewish and African fencing
masters—over the course of this essay; other research questions will readily
suggest themselves.
I
will argue to my last breath both that medieval military history has a place in
the academy and for the value of the traditional subjects of study. Considering
the alt-right’s interest in Vikings, Crusades, and ancient swordplay, I would
even say expertise in this subfield is crucial. But is important in the larger
sense, as well: human beings are inherently political animals, and
unfortunately sometimes these conflicts spill over into actual violence—between
states, between factions in a state, between kin groups and religious sects,
and between individuals. Our history is one of the subjection of one people to
another and the looting of labor and resources, justified by regimes of
power-knowledge. However, by understanding this history, we equip ourselves to
recognize and combat these tendencies.
What
is happening now in the academy is a re-alignment in the distribution of
resources that plays heavily into ideas of power, authority, and legitimacy. The
STEM fields and vocational careers are at the front of the line to receive increasingly
scarce funding in institutions that increasingly resemble for-profit businesses.
Meanwhile, administrators look upon the place of the humanities in the new
order of things as being to reinforce the Weltanschauung
of McWorld
even as humanities professors themselves advocate for previously excluded
groups to have their just share of the ever-shrinking resources. We must look
at which way the wind is driving the waves to keep our heads above water even
as we seek to swim against the current. Fortunately, medieval military history
has placed an excellent flotation device beneath our seats. By studying the
history of warfare, we not look at the origins of inter-group confrontations
and equip ourselves to engage in the next conflict—or, preferably, to avoid
it—but also cast light upon our nature as creatures who commit violence. However,
we are also moral animals: Though most of us are guilty of benefitting from an
unjust society, this is not an excuse for amorality in our academic work or our
professional conduct. Being a good scholar requires keeping abreast of, and
taking seriously, changes in our discipline and related fields. Medieval
military history is indeed valuable, and understanding critical race and gender
theory will help us bring a new perspective to these subjects for the
twenty-first century. We have much to think about.
Ken Mondschein uncomfortably straddles the line between the “academic” and “popular”
historian. A full-time contingent professor and medieval martial arts teacher,
he is also a widely published and professionally active active scholar, a
jouster, and a modern épée fencer and coach. He received his PhD in 2010.
