Aldo A. Settia

Battaglie Medievali

(Il Mulino, Bologna, 2020), 353 pp. €25.00

It is a reasonable guess that any book in English (or indeed French) with a title like “Medieval Battles” would be structured around iconic confrontations like Hastings, Bouvines, Crécy and Agincourt. It is therefore refreshing to come across one which does not regard developments north of the Alps and west of the Rhine as normative and foregrounds battles like Civitate, Legnano, Montaperti and Castagnaro.

Despite the generalising title, Settia’s focus is itself limited. Naval battles are excluded, as (mostly) are sieges. The focus is on battles in Italy, with occasional glances at fights in Outremer where one side was composed of Italian forces. The vast majority of cases date from after 1100; while coverage extends into the fifteenth century, it becomes patchy after 1400 (for instance the battle of Anghiari does not rate a single mention despite its importance in Florentine history and the great condottieri of that era are reduced to at best supporting roles, with no mention of Francesco Sforza).

Nor is it entirely easy to summarise the content of the book. Although issues of recruitment and raising armies are touched on, this is not really a study of the social and economic impact of warfare or of military organisation. While Settia does consider the development of tactical approaches employing organised infantry units based on a triple division of spearmen, crossbowmen and bearers of the large pavise shields perfected by the early fourteenth century (battles could easily be lost if one of these elements failed to make it to the field in time), he is not primarily interested in issues of weaponry and battlefield tactics. The impact of gunpowder weapons, for instance, is barely addressed. One detects the legacy of John Keegan’s seminal “The Face of Battle” in certain sections, as when he talks about fear in the build up to battle, the sensory experience of combat in stifling heat and dust, the oppressive din of battle and the physical exhaustion of wearing armour for hours on end (though, perhaps surprisingly, issues round fighting in rain or fog- both common enough in Italy- do not rate specific discussion). Indeed some of the most vivid moments home in on specific episodes, like brutal close quarters combat in the swampy woodlands which covered large areas of the Po valley or the Bolognese infantry standing firm at San Procolo in 1275 even after their cavalry had fled and they were bombarded by the kind of giant crossbow normally deployed on city walls. Other parts are more technical, such as a section on the mechanics of issuing challenges to battle (by the fourteenth century, if the job of choosing a suitable site and date was consigned to an expert committee of senior knights drawn from each side there was most unlikely to be a battle) or an analysis of the fines levied to keep men in line on campaign and (hopefully) make sure they did not desert on the eve of battle.

As the foregoing perhaps suggests, the main weakness of the book is a certain fragmentation and lack of focus. The structure does not help. There are four substantive chapters, dealing with getting the armies to the field, the moment of confrontation with the enemy (this includes matters like fear and desertion), the actual period of combat and the aftermath. These however are broken down into no less than forty two mostly quite short sub-sections, some of which could easily have been placed in a different chapter from the one they are set in. The result is somewhat kaleidoscopic- perhaps reflecting all too faithfully the chaos of the battlefield but sometimes difficult to follow.

From a comparative perspective those more used to warfare beyond the Alps can find much food for thought in Settia’s account. For instance, he reinforces Dominique Barthélemy’s recent insight that medieval battles were equine slaughterhouses in which elite human combatants were more at risk of capture than death. On the other hand, while he has much to say about the problems inherent in battlefield plundering and squabbles over who had taken a given captive (more than one battle’s result was reversed when the apparent winners lost cohesion to loot), there does not appear to be anything like the level of information about Italian ransom culture to match Rémy Ambühl’s work. It is possible that this culture may have been rather different, at least in the thirteenth and early fourteenth century when there seem to have been political drivers which limited the role of ransoms (an issue not covered by Settia). For instance, after Montaperti in 1260 elite Florentine captives were deliberately held by the Sienese and their allies (who included Florentine Ghibelline exiles with designs on the government of their home city) for policy reasons. Clearly rulers north of the Alps hung on to particularly valuable captives on occasion (e.g. Charles d’Orléans in the decades after Agincourt) but one feels there is an interesting comparative dimension to explore.

Indeed the whole issue of exiles and “counter-communes” and how their presence affected Italian warfare merits further consideration. Settia is well aware that more battles were refused than were ever joined and that armies would frequently glower at each other (often separated by a convenient river- Settia notes just how many Italian battles were fought on the banks of or in close proximity to rivers), shouting insults, with a few hotheads engaging in small scale detached combat between the battlefronts, before turning back for home. One wonders, however, whether the presence of exile forces in the wide ranging “Guelf” and “Ghibelline” coalition armies assembled from time to time affected the decision making on whether to fight- these were men who did not have a home to go to, after all- and perhaps made Italy a slightly less “battle reluctant” culture than other parts of Europe. One also wonders in practical terms how exiles distinguished themselves in visual terms from the brother-enemies they were fighting.

Settia’s account is full of intriguing little nuggets which stick in the memory. The manufacture of arrow-shaped amulets in a Pavian parish implies that there was a particular fear of that form of weaponry. Siena emerges as a pioneer in unorthodox warfare, paying an agent to infiltrate the enemy’s team of astrological advisors and scattering poisonous herbs on the ground in the hope they would be consumed by enemy horses. He also questions a few tenacious myths, playing down the role of the legendary caroccio war cart in Italian battles. On his telling, the caroccio’s hour of glory was relatively brief (perhaps a century and a half) and confined to a limited number of communes. The ox-drawn vehicles were simply too slow to be practical components of most campaigns and even their conversion to horse traction in the thirteenth century did not entirely resolve the problem. He argues that the last certain deployment of one came in 1290 and that claims that Hawkwood captured the Veronese caroccio at Castagnaro almost a century later derive from modern scholars blindly following a corrupt chronicle text.

Whatever issues one may have over aspects of his approach, Settia’s work has the huge merit of opening up areas of military culture less familiar to audiences primarily focused on warfare in medieval northwest Europe. It therefore ought to be read by any student of medieval warfare with the relevant linguistic capacities.

Brian Ditcham
Independent Scholar