Stephen Morillo
War and Conflict in the Middle Ages: A Global Perspective
(Polity, 2022), 257pp. €21.50
War and Conflict is a combination of history of philosophy, military history, political history, and climate history. It advances both a radical argument about what the definition of the Middle Ages ought to be, and in doing so strongly rejects the notion of an “early modern” world, as well as a slightly less radical position in its definition of the “global” Middle Ages. Morillo also brings a climate focused historical framework to his analysis while simultaneously trying to draw out the fundamental links in warfare across centuries and continents, all in less than 250 pages of text. While each of these topics is certainly worth of consideration, fitting them all into a book this short poses a significant challenge in terms of having enough space to give each of them their due. Similarly, the book’s vast geographic and temporal scope requires a diversity of knowledge beyond the capacity of any one scholar. Morillo makes a noble effort in tackling these problems but while the book contains several very interesting sections it is ultimately unable to overcome the fundamental challenge of trying to fit so much into so little.
War and Conflict in the Middle Ages is divided into two sections. The first covers the wider philosophical considerations of the book while the second is a more traditional military/political history of the medieval world. The book opens with descriptions of three battles: a key battle in the Islamic expansion of the eighth century, a high medieval battle between Song China and the Mongols, and a late medieval battle between the Duke of Burgundy and the Swiss Federation. The choice of these battles helps to underpin the global perspective Morillo aims to take but the promise of returning to them as point of analysis later in the text never fully manifests. While the conflict between China and the Mongols is expanded upon in part two, the Swiss-Burgundian battle is barely mentioned again and, overall, the structure of the book does not seem intended to reflect this initial framing device. This is not in and of itself a problem, the book does not need to constantly refer to these battles for its core arguments to work. However, it is somewhat indicative of wider structural problems with the text and the way that some of the threads it lays out don’t quite follow through all the way to the end.
Probably the most interesting chapter is the second one, on questions and methods. This chapter lays out the more radical elements of the approach Morillo took with the book. These include the global approach, and a discussion of what is meant by the concept of a global Middle Ages and whether that makes coherent sense; the emphasis on climate and climate history that underpins Morillo’s view of the Middle Ages; and Morillo’s challenge to the concept of an “early modern” age, which he proposes is a chimera and should be replaced with an extension of the medieval rather than an early arrival of the modern. While not every argument in this section is necessarily totally convincing, it presents an engaging challenge to established traditions in how the medieval has been conceived of by generations of scholars and as such represents probably the most exciting part of the book. While scholars will not necessarily be fully convinced to embrace Morillo’s radical approach after reading this chapter, it will certainly provide food for thought and challenge preconceptions, potentially shifting the needle a little closer to Morillo’s viewpoint.
The next two chapters attempt to lay out the overarching principles that linked warfare across the globe during the Middle Ages. The focus, as with much of the book, is really on Eurasia rather than truly global – Africa and the Americas receive only sparse attention, as does the Indian sub-continent. The first of these chapters examines geographical principles while the second focuses more on technology. While it contains some interesting arguments, it hard to not see some of the book’s core problems coming to the fore in this section. Namely, that no one scholar can be an expert in all the topics that Morillo is trying to cover here and fitting this analysis into such a short space requires taking so high-level a view of the subject matter that the reader is practically in orbit. A certain level of nuance must inevitably be lost when attempting a history like this, but more specific examples would have provided valuable support for the overall arguments.
The second part of the book is meant to be where the text gets more specific, and for the most part it does. These chapters present a general history of the world, but primarily Eurasia, from c.500 and into, with apologies to Morillo, the early modern era. As a point of reference for the Eurasian focus of this section, Chapter Six, on the High Middle Ages, is thirty-six pages long and devotes just two pages to India, none to the Americas, and one page only on Egypt. This section is interesting, but it arguably strays closer to being a high level introductory political history of the subject than it is a pure analysis of the military history. The rise and fall of dynasties and wider political and economic trends get more of the focus than subjects like how armies were recruited, sustained in the field, or waged battles and sieges. Readers may emerge with a greater understanding of how the dynasties of medieval China melded into one another, but they will not learn very much about Chinese military tactics of the medieval dynasties.
This in and of itself is not a bad thing, but it does reinforce the notion that the book is not entirely clear what it is meant to be about. Is this a book about the impact of climate on the development of global medieval warfare? Is it a book arguing that continuity of medieval warfare lasted well past the traditional Euro-centric date of the end of the fifteenth century? Is it a book about wider political and economic trends that underpinned conflict in Eurasia in the Middle Ages? It is kind of a book about all of these things and more, but with less than 250 pages of text to work with it doesn’t have the space necessary to fully deliver on all of these premises. The final section on the late medieval is particularly troubled, as it tries to both be a high-level examination of late medieval warfare as well as an extended argument on why the year 1500 was not the end of the Middle Ages, the real end was the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.
It is also unfortunate that several errors have crept into the book’s text. These include basic factual errors as well as some wider historiographical issues. Factual errors include erroneously stating that bone is a core component in constructing composite bows (p.100), stating that the prophet Mohommed died in 532 (p.134), ascribing the conquest of Constantinople to Suleiman the Magnificent (p.216), and stating that the Battle of Crécy took place in 1347 (p.222). It is not unreasonable to expect some minor errors to creep in when writing a book – writing is difficult and at least some of these could be simple typos. However, it does not inspire confidence in the thoroughness of the review of the text, either by fellow scholars or by the editors at Polis Press and raises some concerns about elements that may be less immediately obvious.
These issues lie in some of the historiography included in the book. As an expert in medieval European warfare, it is no surprise that Morillo is particularly strong on that area, but no individual’s expertise can extend to all topics, and it is unfortunate to see several oversimplifications creep into the text when covering other topics. To take an example, when discussing the Americas Morillo uncritically uses Aztec as a stand in for all peoples of what is now central Mexico.[1] In Chapter Seven Morillo even discusses the challenges faced by the Aztec Empire in terms of maintaining unity in the face of Spanish invasion without naming any of the disparate groups that composed or opposed the empire.
Similarly, Morillo mentions the role of disease in destabilising the Americas in the early 1500s but neglects the significant shift in scholarship that increasingly points to disease as being a symptom of genocidal activities of European colonists rather than purely a biological accident.[2] This is a fairly crucial shift in scholarly opinion and neglecting it underpins the trouble with a single author tackling so wide a scope of history.
Overall, Morillo’s War and Conflict in the Middle Ages is an interesting book with some intriguing ideas, but it is either too long or too short to fully live up to its potential. A shorter and more purely philosophical work that emphasised Morillo’s challenge to orthodoxy around the scope of the Middle Ages and historian’s conception of it could have been a fascinating read. Similarly, a larger work, potentially with multiple authors, could have better managed the enormous scope of this book’s ambition. As it stands, it is a fine read, but not a necessary one.
Stuart Ellis-Gorman
Independent Scholar
[1] See for example Matthew Restall, When Montezuma Met Cortés: The True Story of the Meeting that Changed History, (New York, 2018) for a good discussion of the historiography of the debate around the use of label Aztec.
[2] See for example, Catherine M. Cameron, Paul Kelton, and Alan C. Swedlund (eds.) Beyond Germs: Native Depopulation in North America, (Tuscon, 2015) on the significant shift on how much blame can reasonably be assigned to germs and disease alone in terms of causing Native American depopulation.
