Is there anywhere I can find accurate depictions of battles fought before firearms? I can’t even imagine the physical conditioning needed to fight a battle like that for 30 minutes or more. Is there a lot known about the training? As a kid I was involved in a few gang fights and after 5 minutes or so we were usually separated. We were city kids and not work hardened so I imagine they were quite a bit tougher but I still can’t imagine many of them having much fight left in them after 10 minutes. I have seen some of the Mexican laborers with beer bellies go at it one on one for 15 or 20 minutes, but even that is not the same as what you might be faced with in a battle with adversaries coming from every angle.
The “Saxon Stories” by Bernard Cornwell has the best historical medieval battle scenes I’ve ever read. First novel is “The Last Kingdom”. Also a series on Netflix. Highly recommended - tells the story of how England was formed out of various loose kingdoms and tribes in Britain. Historical fiction, but uses real history and real battles as a backdrop.
It’s actually relatively difficult to find in depth, accurate pre-firearm battle depictions outside of dense academic tomes.
I know of several such tomes but they are not super accessible–none are available as ebooks and they have list prices above $100, many are also additionally only available in small print runs.
The “Brill’s Companion” books on warfare (Brill’s puts out companion books on tons of scholarly topics, not just war), have very in detail, scholarly articles written by professional historians in the various fields.
I don’t know how much we like reddit links, but I will say r/AskHistorians has some really high quality posts on some of these subjects. One of their moderators ( Iphikrates (u/Iphikrates) - Reddit) is Dr Roel Konijnendijk, who aside from having a Dutch name I would never dare attempt pronouncing, is a PhD in Philosophy / Ancient History and is an expert in ancient warfare–he has lectured at Oxford and the University of Edinburgh.
You could do worse than reading some of his salient posts on the topic.
There is always Julius Caesar. I cannot personally vouch for his accuracy, but it is a fun read.
You didn’t have adversaries coming from every angle. Fighting in formation is much more effective than chaos. It’s only once you break their formations that it turns into chaos.
Soldiers could form lines, and they could form squares, and all other types of formations. Sometimes they would form wedges so that they could power through defensive lines.
In a typical square formation, you’d have archers in the middle surrounded by infantry grunts with spears or swords. Any enemy at a distance gets shot at by huge volleys of arrows. Anyone up close faces an entire line of guys with shields, so there’s no gap, and spears are sticking out between the shields. It’s a very effective formation.
One issue you have with formations like squares is while they are very effective, half your men are doing nothing. If you are at a distance, the archers are doing all the work and the outer infantry grunts aren’t doing anything. If you’re up close, your too close for the archers in the middle to be doing anything effective so it’s only the infantry grunts that are doing any real work. It’s not practical for archers to carry both a long bow and a spear or a large sword, so the archers can’t easily switch roles. Archers can carry a knife or a short sword, but it takes time to switch weapons, if they do switch weapons they generally have to drop the bow and won’t be able to easily retrieve it once the formation moves around, and they’ll be much less effective as fighters due to the short weapon’s limited reach.
Even if you are fighting in lines and not squares, you still have different divisions of soldiers. You can have rows of grunts armed with spears and shields, with a few rows of archers behind them. The advantage that squares have over lines is that your enemy can run around your flank and get behind a line. A square is equally defended in all directions.
The Greeks get credited for the Phalanx, though it probably came from the Sumerians before them. With a Phalanx, you get a bunch of guys with large shields and put them in a line so close together that their shields overlap. Every soldier is protected not only by his own shield but also by the shields of the soldiers on either side of him. If you are trying to attack a Phalanx, there’s no inherent weak spot, no gaps between soldiers that you can exploit. Phalanx soldiers were usually armed with long spears, so not only were they well-defended, but they were also armed with very effective and very long-reaching weapons.
The Romans improved on the Phalanx by adding second and third ranks behind them. The soldiers in front had their shields in front of them, and the soldiers in the rear ranks carried their shields over their heads to protect all three ranks from archer fire. If someone managed to get behind your line, the third rank could turn around and lower their shield so that they formed a second rearward-facing Phalanx.
This division between distance weapons and close weapons is where muskets came in. It’s a lot easier to train soldiers to use muskets than bows. A musket is basically “point this end at the bad guys” where a bow takes a lot more training to build up both strength and accuracy. Put bayonets on the end of your muskets, and now your soldiers can shoot at a distance and can stab up close, so you have effectively doubled your fighting force. You don’t have infantry grunts doing nothing at a distance and you don’t have archers doing nothing up close. Everyone is a musketeer and they all function both at a distance and at close range.
Battles during the smooth bore musket era still had a lot in common with older pre-firearm battles. Soldiers would fire muskets at a distance, but then they would fix bayonets and charge. Bayonet fighting was a lot more like old-fashioned spear fighting than anything you’d see on a modern battlefield. Throughout the Napoleonic wars and the American Revolution, don’t picture them as modern battlefields, even though they are using guns. Up close and personal bayonet fighting accounted for roughly a third of all battlefield casualties. It’s only when you get to the U.S. Civil War era that changes in tactics and weapons made bayonet fighting almost obsolete (accounting for less than 1 percent of battlefield casualties).
If you look at bayonets from the U.S. Revolutionary War and the U.S. Civil War, they look like spears. They are pointy, usually 3-sided, to prevent bending, not to make “blood channels” or some other nonsense that you’ll find floating around on the internet, and were very long. After bayonets proved to be fairly useless during the Civil War (with a few exceptions) they switched to bayonets that looked more like camp knives, which made them more useful around the camp but still allowed them to be used as last-ditch weapons.
So picture early firearm battles as having a lot more in common with the pre-firearm battles that you are interested in and a lot less in common with modern firearm battles.
Some links you may be interested in:
A lot of great answers, just want to thank all of you.
The Face of Battle by John Keegan gets at a lot of the issues you are interested in (what was it like, how did it work, why did they do this not that, etc.).
A real historian, but writes some books for the layperson.
Victor David Hanson wrote several books on the planning, organization and aftermath of ancient battles.
Basically, you fight during 10 - 15 minutes then switch with another line (fresh) and for cavalry you need spare mounts (a lot). And arrows. Logistics were as important then than now.
First hand accounts of actual fighting (versus post hoc romantization) are fairly rare, particularly in the pre-medieval period, and HEMA re-enactments are necessarily a lot of guesswork and recreation that are limited by the desire of combatants to not actually injure one another, but as the o.p. correctly surmises melee fighting with heavy weapons and armor or shield is quickly fatiguing. A type of physical conditioning that has come into vogue in the last decade and change is using steel clubs and maces, which are weapon-like weights that are used in swinging and thrusting motions akin to their practical application, and I can attest to the fact that you can get a phenomenal workout swinging a 25# or 30# club or a 15# or 20# mace for just fifteen or twenty minutes regardless of how fit you think you are. In the reality of actual combat, wearing armor and struggling to maintain your footing while dodging blows and looking for an opening, I suspect that five minutes of actual fighting would be exhausting to any combatant.
Again, historical sources are pretty suspect, but by most accounts large scale fighting between groups with numerical parity and tactical skill with shield walls and other formations usually only lasted a few minutes until enough people fell to break lines, and then combat devolved into a scrum of individual fights or a rout as the less disciplined and disorganized force ran for cover. I hate to cite the otherwise grossly anachronistic and mostly fabulist Braveheart but in the case of the battle scenes (filmed using HEMA enthusiasts) it was probably pretty representative even if they did set the Battle of Sterling Bridge in an open field with no bridge or stream in evidence.
Individual combat, particularly in the European late medieval period where heavy mail and plate armor were available (for the aristocratic class; the average foot soldier was lucky to have gambeson with some boiled leather reinforcement, and even professional soldiers usually had lamellar or a light chain hauberk and maybe a topcap helm with a noseguard) were also less glorious and honorable than portrayed in romantic literature. Most of the features you see in medieval armor and weapons were designed to be anything but chivalrous or ensure a ‘fair’ combat, and a lot of the tactics were just trying to get the opponent tangled up in their own heavy armor or break their weapon so that you could jump atop them facedown and stab them through the visor or in a gap in the armor rather than ‘chivalrous’ exchanges of sword blows. Viking and Saxon raiders often wore little armor other than head protection, relying on speed and proficiency with axes and spears versus set-to dueling with swords, but these guys were also undoubtedly in peak physical condition (were usually younger men who worked family farms during their non-raiding time, and anybody who has done farm work without the aid of modern machinery can attest to how quickly that conditions and hardens you up) and mostly relied upon their fearsome reputation and appearance to command tribute or fealty from landholders that they threatened.
Cultures other than Europe had different fighting customs and weapons but the essentials of melee armored combat are essentially universal. Even if you are Conan the Well-Oiled Barbarian King you’re still only going to be swinging a heavy axe or greatsword for a few minutes before you need a break to catch your wind.
Stranger
There was a fairly substantial gap, however, between the introduction of personal firearms and the ability to “fix bayonets” and charge—or even stand to defend against an attack.
The Battle of Culloden, fought 1746, is noted for the use of bayonets that fit to the muzzle end of the musket by a ring that went around the muzzle, rather than by having to be shoved (plugged) by the handle into the musket itself (which can only occur after the last shot has been fired, or before, for obvious reasons). The success in defending against the highland charge at Culloden is often attributed to this technological advancement, along with a change in drill/training, standing in contrast to the earlier Battle of Killencrankie, fought during the earlier uprising of 1689. Still firmly in the age of firearms, but without the effective use of bayonets.
And before any kind of bayonet was developed (and in some cases even after) it was not uncommon for formations of musketeers or the like to be defended by pikemen, not unlike formations around medieval archers. Point being, there were hundreds of years of transition with substantial overlap between “medieval” formations with some firearms added to the mix on one end, and line infantry equipped exclusively with firearms and fixed bayonets of the American Revolutionary or Napoleonic War era.
I hope that’s not too much of a hijack. This is precisely the kind of question I wish more people would entertain. Too often, warfare seems to be viewed in terms of generals moving mass formations around the battlefield, with terrain and people alike being thought of as mere lines or figures on a board being moved effortlessly about. Even today, physical conditioning is extraordinarily important, as soldiers are back to wearing light body armor, it turns out assault rifles and their ammo aren’t exactly weightless either, and it can be hard to hit a target even at close range if you’re physically exhausted.
I can’t imagine what it must have been like for the French men at arms at, say, Agincourt, having advanced so far into the mud and effectively just collapsed, unable to move, perhaps even unable to lift their swords. The story that gets passed down in Shakespeare’s Henry V is that the English bowmen won the field that day. In truth, while the English bowmen certainly had something to do with it, large numbers of advancing Frenchmen were simply unable to handle the exertion of slogging their way through the mud to the English line in fighting shape. Many of the French deaths actually came in the immediate aftermath of the advance and shower of arrows, as the English found themselves with more prisoners than they could handle—still with swords at hand—and feared a new French advance, coupled with time to rest, might cause their prisoners to rise up and resume the fight that much closer to the English lines. So the English butchered all but the most valuable prisoners in place.
Something that many modern historians stress too is that you cannot easily separate this reality from historical record–in many cultures and for large segments of history, society was ruled by a “warrior elite.” This warrior elite had a vested interest in promoting the idea that their supremacy at arms skill and their bravery is what entitled them to their elite positions in society.
A classic example is of course the Middle Age warrior elite. They spent a lot of time practicing at swords and horsemanship–but there is a compelling argument that the vast majority of that practice was essentially showing off more than anything to do with real combat. A lot of the skills of individual warriorship actually have little place in any melee pre-firearm battle, because of the fact major battles take place in formations, and what typically decides a battle is which formation breaks first, which is almost always based on morale, not “sword or spear skill” of the enemy combatants. The vaunted warrior elite of the Middle Ages, if they ever did rack up significant battlefield kills, it was very likely riding down panicked and fleeing footmen who had given up the fight, not wading through hordes of the enemy slicing through them like a hero from a modern day movie.
You see similar patterns among other societies that were ruled by a warrior elite–feudal Japan, Ancient Persia, archaic Greeks (what little we know of them.) Note that by the time of the Peloponnesian War most Greek city-states were not run by a warrior elite and their armies were citizen armies supplemented by mercenaries. Despite their reputation, Spartans were almost definitely not particularly fearsome warriors, nor was it true they were the only full-time soldiers of the various Greek city states. Instead, just like in Athens, all Spartan male citizens had an obligation to fight in the military. They did not, as far as we know, practice at fighting any more than anyone else–in fact many, many ancient Greek sources attest that “practicing at spear” and such was a waste of time, because battles are decided by bravery not skill.
This goes tremendously against pop culture representations of pre-modern battle, but there are plenty of attestations of this throughout period history in the pre-modern warfare times. This absolutely does not mean that no one ever practiced anything, it does mean that melee weapon skill was almost never a determinant of battles, that warrior elites frequently honed such skills for cultural reasons (and sometimes to facilitate dueling) and that morale in the key moments of battle tended to be seen as the most important deciding factor by the men who actually fought these battles. It is not a big surprise that ancient Greek society for example spends an inordinate amount of time in its culture celebrating bravery, not swordsmanship or spear skill. Ancient Greeks state that it is the man who can look the enemy in the eye and whose heart stays firm, that wins you a battle.
Archaic Greeks, as best we know before they adopted Hoplite style and phalanxes, fought in loose formation. Leaders would potentially wear showy armor and would scream and rally the troops in the front line–their main role was getting their men to keep fighting, not to be any particular champion with melee weapons.
The ancient Roman Legions followed at least some of the same concepts as the ancient Greeks, they did not place tremendous value in training at weapons or fighting. They placed tons of value in training at maneuver and marching.
This is important because maneuver and marching actually very likely decide most battles in pre-modern history for a number of reasons.
Despite the portrayals in movies of massive armies slamming into each other in huge frontal lines being the “norm”, such meetings were rare, and deliberately so, armies almost never had a desire to engage a decisive conflict that they at all thought they might lose, unless they had no other choice. Thus the ability to march and maneuver allows you to delay or escape from battlefield conditions not to your benefit, and avoid a negative decisive encounter. And of course the better your march and maneuver, the better your odds of occupying a position of tactical advantage when battle must be met.
In many wars (and this various based on war and location), supreme importance was in holding strategic points and attacking where…the enemy wasn’t, namely attacking the enemy’s non-military population or various weakly defended strong points. The Vikings for example were not so successful against the Anglo-Saxons because the Vikings were massively better weapon fighters. It is because Viking longships could sail the open sea and also sail down all the rivers of pre-unification England. The way A-S fyrd’s mobilized was built around times when the various petty Kings of the A-S heptarchy would wage seasonal “campaigns” against one another, the system wasn’t built for rapid response. The Vikings were attacking where the A-S couldn’t rally forces, taking strong points as fait accompli before the A-S could do anything about it, and then the A-S had to contend with primitive sieging or attempt dangerous assaults on well occupied strategic positions. Meanwhile their villages and countryside were being raided and looted, sapping them of resources. The great reforms of Alfred the Great were not in making the fyrd swing their swords better, it was in creating systems of local defense, subsidized by national taxation, that could rapidly move around a shire and occupy pre-set forts to respond to Viking incursions. Once this was effected it became for more difficult for the Danes to operate in England because they were always outnumbered by the A-S, and Alfred’s reforms significantly weakened their ability to leverage their mobility advantage.
While in many wars both sides actively avoided pitched battles unless victory was believed to be highly likely, it is also true that within many battles the two sides were less enthused to engage in mass combat than might be assumed. There are descriptions of many pre-modern battles where both sides spend time hurling missiles at each other and not charging to engage in a melee. Supreme importance appears to have been placed into holding melee formation, and it was not uncommon for formations to briefly engage in melee and then back off, go back to missile fighting, and rinse repeat. Huge frontal charges and long lines of mass melee were not only rare, they frequently only occurred for brief moments of a battle. It was well understood that if one side broke formation things would get very, very bad, and thus it was generally avoided as much as possible. It is worth noting in many battles individual soldiers would never even make it to the front lines of the melee, and many battles would likely have a few moments of brief melee and then both sides would withdraw, sometimes going again the next day and sometimes both armies just marching away. It is worth mentioning historians write about and legends are developed around the big decisive battles, but that likely vastly overestimates the frequency of such battles compared to the total number of battles.
Another thing almost never well shown in film is how important something as simple as a defensive ditch can be. The Romans for example likely won many battles because of the fact all of their men carried shovels and they were very adept and building impromptu earthworks in almost all of their Pax Romana Imperial Era and late Republican era campaigns (careful on that mind you–it is very easy to fall into the trap of casually talking about the Roman military as an invariant, when it stretched across a space of some 800 years in Western Europe and even longer if you include the post-collapse Eastern Roman Empire that continued until the 1400s.) Ceasar himself makes note of how the soldiers carry entrenching tools and make regular use of them in his writings.
A simple earthen rampart with a ditch dug in front of it has likely decided far more battles than talented swordsmen.
In the category of YouTube videos where an expert rates the accuracy of movie scenes, there’s a lot in which an historian reacts to period battle sequences. And they will inevitably shake their heads and chuckle when the scene devolves into an undifferentiated mob of one-on-one fights.
I saw one where the guy actually said something like, “Why does it always turn into this? It was almost never like this. The reality is so much cooler. Why this?”
To some degree late 17th, 18th and 19th centuries (which are firearm era) are possibly the height of the offensive charge as a military tactic–not the eras that came prior to it. There are a number of reasons for this, some of which is actually just the fact that more formalized study was being done about the mechanics of battle and wars, Generals of the 18th century probably understood far better than a typical French Marshal or English King of the Hundred Years War era just how decisive a battle could be won by a well-engineered charge that breaks the enemy’s spirit. Additionally, the sort of “low grade melee” that was typical of many of the pre-firearm battles that don’t get made into famous movies and plays, likely decreased in viability when firearms started appearing on the field in large numbers.
While early firearms were somewhat ineffective in numerous ways the people who were managing the transition seemed to prefer them to other things, which is a powerful indicator of their utility. At the same time there was also a strong hatred of firearms use by the warrior elite. You see this with cultural depictions from the ruling class well into the 1500s in Europe (i.e. even when Cervantes was writing Don Quixote this sentiment of the ignobility of firearms persisted); in the Mamluk Sultanate, a powerful armored cavalry elite just called the “Mamluks” by history emerged–oddly these were non-Arab slaves drafted to be the elite armored knights of the Arab-ruled Sultanate (while Arab ruled, at the time the vast majority of the Sultanate’s people were non-Arab peoples.) Much like the Ottoman Janissaries they eventually developed political and administrative importance. In the late 15th and early 16th century while the Ottomans had more readily adopted early firearms, the Mamluks wrote denigrations of them (this is in spite of the fact we know that firearms of some form, and cannon, had been used at least since the 1200s in limited amounts by the Mamluks themselves.)
There were a few major battles in the early 16th century between Ottomans and Mamluks where massive use of firearms by the Ottomans decisively defeated the better trained and armored Mamluk elite.
It goes back to Homer after all. The real Greeks fought in well-disciplined rows - because the first side to lose discipline lost the battle (generally badly), but Homer is all about one-on-one battles between fighters.
Yeah. Before uniform, soldiers had to fight in formation. other while how do they know the foes? Oh sure a legionnaire could tell celt as a foe, but in the medieval battles, most looked pretty much the same.
Good post!
As to getting tired, Legionnaires for example would routinely march 20 miles a day in full kit, about 50 pounds. At the end of that, they’d make a fortified camp before bedding down.
We aren’t really sure how the Myceneans fought. The historical and archaeological record of this topic is very scant. Military historians have various ways of making analyses, and the general belief is they probably fought in a common “form” for the region, which was shield and spear, but the spear was a projectile weapon hurled when battle was engaged. They would then likely have closed to close quarters and fought with rudimentary swords and weapons of that nature.
The Hoplite Phalanx which developed around the time Homer liver (Archaic Greek period), was likely not how the Myceneans fought. Unsurprisingly Homer depicted mythical heroes of the Mycenean age to fight like his contemporaries because that is all he would have known, and he likely would not have understood that military tactics change over time.
Even the best historians have to do a lot of “analysis” and hypothesizing to get at much about Ancient Greek warfare, and frankly a lot of reliance is made on ancient texts–and re-analyzing them. Many Ancient Greek military texts were first studied by modern Westerners in Prussia in the mid-19th century, and it is now felt the Prussians made some significant errors in their analysis of the original Greek works, that several generations of other historians just kind of blindly accepted, but that are now being re-evaluated.
What about archaeology? We have very little archaeological evidence when it comes to Archaic and Mycenean military sites. There has never really been anything like a discovery a big battlefield that we find tons of Bronze Age weapons and armors in and thus know for sure it’s the site of a battle. There are some sites with a decent concentration of more minor artifacts like belt buckles etc, that suggest maybe a battle occurred there, but it is highly uncertain.
If you think about it though, that makes sense. For one, in the Bronze age…anything made of Bronze was very, very valuable, this metal was…what defined the age, it was the major trade good moving around the eastern Mediterranean. After a big battle there is very, very little chance anyone would leave something like a shield with a bronze outer layer, bronze weapons, or any type of bronze armor just sitting there. It would be all collected in an organized way, pack animals and such would be laden with it and it would be taken off either for use or trade.
That alone would make finding an archaeological site difficult. Additionally, unlike in some places, most of the areas of Greece where the topography is such that you expect a major battle could occur…is also exactly the areas of Greece where intensive agriculture has been ongoing for 3000 years. This means field tilled and sown, over and over again for thousands of years.
Compared to a site like say, the aforementioned Culloden Moor, which was a lightly used grazing area kind of in the middle of nowhere, a site like that is going to have a lot more artifacts. Additionally musket balls were flying back and forth in Culloden and most of those aren’t going to be retrieved, there isn’t a ready equivalent to Bronze Age warfare of a disposable metal weapon that no one would bother to try and recover. It is even likely that they made an effort to recover metal arrowheads whenever possible in ancient times.
Thank you for your detailed response
That’s really the thing about pre-modern combat that has struck me in reading about it. The dramatic importance of morale and leadership in terms of keeping the troops fighting and not fleeing.
It was all about standing firm in the face of danger, and doing whatever fighting there was and not fleeing when things got rough. That’s why the Spartans were so feared; they were trained from birth to not run, not break, and have the sort of esprit de corps that prevented individual Spartans from breaking for fear of letting down their comrades and/or individual shame.
Ko-nine-n-dike: = “rabbit dike”.