The Medieval Siege

by Jim Bradbury

In medieval warfare, the siege for every battle, there were hundreds of sieges. Yet the rich and vivid history of siege warfare has been consistently neglected. Jim Bradbury's panoramic survey takes the history of siege warfare in Europe from the late Roman Empire to the 16th century, and includes sieges in Byzantium, Eastern Europe and the areas affected by the Crusades. Within this broad sweep of time and place, he finds, not that enormous changes occurred, which might have been expected, but that the rules and methods of siege warfare remained remarkably constant. His narrative of the main events of siege warfare includes adetailed study of some of the major sieges —Constantinople and Chateau-Gaillard, among others — and also presents evidence relating to the development of siege weapons and siege warfare. A history of sieges necessarily brings the people caught up in them, besieger and besieged, clearly before the reader; stories from chronicles and letters of danger, famine, endurance and heroism reach out with an immediacy that provides a powerful human context for this study.JIM BRADBURY is the author of The Medieval Archer; he writes and lectures on battles and warfare in England and France in the middle ages.

Genres: History, Medieval History, Medieval, Military Fiction, Nonfiction, European History

378 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1998

About the author

Jim Bradbury (born 27 February 1937) is a British historian specialising in the military history of the Middle Ages. Bradbury lectured in history at Brunel University.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Bra...

Reviews

[Helen · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book does present a great deal of information about the subject of Medieval siege warfare but it isn't very well written, and the information isn't well-organized. I eventually did get into the book but at first, it was confusing to me. Perhaps if I were more familiar with the era, I would have gotten more out of it.

Siege warfare has been a standard military method of conquest since antiquity - either actively besieging or storming fortified points such as castles or towns protected by walls or moats, or simply starving out the defenders, by cutting them off from food supplies. There were however many considerations to take into account in planning a siege, such as the length of service of the troops, which could be only 40 days, the possibilities of provisioning the besiegers from the surrounding territory, including finding drinkable water for the encampment, considerations of climate, and if the garrison might be amenable to surrender - or negotiation, to work out surrender terms. A surprising number of sieges were settled without actual conflict - much depended on the terms offered - but there was also the possibility that one side or the other might not honor the terms, and this perception might lead to protracted resistance, if defeat were seen as leading to inevitable destruction or possibly slavery. The code of chivalry demanded sticking to one´s promises, and was based on Christian concepts including merciful or ethical behavior - but that was not always the case.

Because many territories had not coalesced into states, or if they had, they weren't particularly powerful states, the Medieval era suffered a great deal of instability, with various counts, barons etc striving among themselves and with the local overlord or even, monarch, for dominance or expansion of territory. That meant warfare of one sort or another - many times involving sieges - was incessant. There was also the advance of Islam into North Africa, the Mid-East and even Europe, that is, the Iberian Peninsula, and eventually the Balkan Peninsula as the Byzantine Empire was gradually entirely conquered by the Turks - a process that set off a number of crusades from Europe to Asia Minor and the Mid-East as well as the hundreds of years of Reconquista battles and sieges in Spain and Portugal. More crusades were launched in Northern Europe to Christianize Baltic tribes. The hundreds of years of battles, sieges, and general devastation surprisingly didn't see many technological advances other than the introduction of Greek Fire to siege warfare in the Early Middle Ages, the trebuchet - a large catapult - in the Central Middle Ages, and finally the cannon in the Late Middle Ages. Otherwise, the basic system of either trying to knock down, burn, or storm a fortress, or starve out the defenders, or negotiate surrender terms - remained virtually unchanged throughout the Western world and beyond.

There were many references in the book to historical figures that I think the writer assumed the reader would already be familiar with - but such references to a reader who is not familiar with the figures were mystifying if not meaningless. There was often a lack of back-story or context - but occasionally there were some extended narrative sections when recounting the story of a notable battle or how defenders fared in an extended siege. For an example of a glaring lack of context, the writer didn´t give any background whatsoever on the Albigensian crisis in France, but rather launched into a description of the crusade against the Albigensians itself. I happen to have found out about the religious heresy and how it was crushed by the Catholic monarch and nobles, etc., many years ago - and still remember enough to have understood what the writer was referring to when he wrote about the Albigensian crusade, rather the crusade to crush Albigensianism. But what about readers who were coming across the term for the first time? Were they supposed to drop everything to look up the history of Albigensianism in order to make sense of the section on that crusade? The writer seemed to take a lot for granted. There was no general overview or introduction to topics. Although the book was well-illustrated, the reproductions weren´t particularly high quality - they were rather grayish in tone. This book was written almost three decades ago and has by now no doubt been superseded by newer possibly more accessible studies of the subject; still, for a general overview of the topic, although it left quite a bit to be desired, it wasn´t too bad. If a reader sticks with it, they will derive some knowledge of the topic, and gain some insight into the development of castles, fortresses, siege engines, siege warfare etc.

Here are some quotes:

¨The castle is more or less synonymous with the middle ages, and is symbolic of the siege warfare of the period.¨

¨Roman fortifications survived into the early middle ages, and sometimes throughout the middle ages.¨

¨Vitruvius...emphasized the importance of building [defenses] on firm foundations, of making the foundations broader than the superstructure, and of using tie-beams. Early medieval Dijon ... was a realization of just such ideals: thirty defended gates, walls that were thirty feet high and fifteen feet thick, with thirty-three projecting towers.¨

¨The survival of Roman fortifications into the early medieval period is obvious in many areas.¨

¨The continued use of Roman fortifications in the West is an easily accepted fact, and of tremendous influence upon early medieval warfare."

¨It has been said that siege warfare developed from the straightforward attack by storm into a more complicated use of tactics and machines.¨

¨The Romans used carefully constructed weapons based on mathematical principles: Ammianus in the fourth century speaks of the development of the use of models for the making of siege engines.¨

¨The defenses of Constantinople are probably the best example of fortification from this [early medieval] age.¨

¨The walls [of Constantinople] were begun in the fourth century AD, and frequently repaired thereafter, but they remained ´remarkably uniform,´ and an example of ´remarkable conservation.´´´

¨[by the 5th C AD in Constantinople] ...there were ... five lines of defense with 192 towers. The wall was thirty to forty feet high, and thirteen to sixteen feet thick.¨

¨Constantinople itself was the best known fortified city in the world, and was a model and ideal for other cities.¨

¨[Greek Fire] ... seemed to be almost impossible to deal with, and played a major role in the defense of Byzantium in the early middle ages.¨

¨There were many attacks on [Constantinople] the richest target of the age, including three major attempts against the city. The first occurred in 626, when the Persians and Avars combined to besiege Constantinople.¨

¨The second of the three major sieges of Constantinople in the early middle ages occurred between 674 and 678. It came about in consequence of the great Islamic expansion. ... From an area not previously noted for its military achievements, ignited by the faith and enthusiasm of a new religion, they burst out of Arabia into an ever widening fan, stretching through North Africa to the Middle East.¨

¨There was a second great Arab siege between 717 and 718.¨

¨In the eyes of medieval Christians promises made to the infidels were not of much account.¨

¨One feature of medieval warfare, which is demonstrated time and again, is the speed with which groups copy the methods and weapons of their enemy: superiority in either was usually short-lived.¨

¨...for leaders conducting the defense, appeal to religion was an important morale booster. The Byzantine practice of parading with icons is well known, and similar things happened in the West.¨

¨In the Carolingian era, siege warfare followed the lines laid down in the time of the Merovingians. Major sieges were still of towns.¨

¨Civilization has always in the last resort been established and defended by success in war.¨

¨...with longer stays the vikings inevitably constructed their own fortifications...¨

¨By the eleventh century, society had feudalized and localized: if power had not exactly transferred into the hands of local lords, it had at least been redistributed in such a way that the role of such lords had increased considerably. The social and economic growth of local lordship was marked by the rise of local fortifications."

¨In England... ....by 1200 there were several hundred fortifications. The special circumstances of invasion called for rapid fortification, and a castle at York was erected in eight days.¨

¨...the greater the lord, the greater the castle he could finance.¨

¨...warfare [in the Age of Castles] consisted of perhaps one per cent battles and ninety-nine per cent sieges. One does not wish to suggest that battles were unimportant, it was partly because their consequences were so drastic that they were avoided when possible, but in terms of sheet numbers sieges dominated.¨

¨To challenge an opponent the most obvious ploy was to besiege one of his castles.¨

¨...the existence of well fortified and provisioned castles became the basis of warfare. They were not easy to take if resolutely held.¨

¨Virtually all military campaigns in this age came to be dominated by the necessity to capture strong points.¨

¨Garrisons in normal times were often formed from men executing their feudal duties, performing castle-guard. Like most aspects of feudalism this seems to have been flexible and open to arrangement, rather than following an invariable system. Commonly service from surrounding estates was tied to the local castle.¨

¨As the ´Historia Novella´ put it; ´there were many castles all over England, each defending its own district,´ and adds ´defending their own districts, or rather plundering them:´ the castle could represent illicit as well as legitimate power.¨

¨Princes needed loyal men in key position, including those who held major castles. For royal castles, and for those of nobles this was vital; hence the significance of keeping both a loyal nobility, and of employing trusted captains. Henry I was accused of handing castles to ´new flatterers,´ but his reasons are clear. On the other hand comital or royal power could be threatened by the rise of those below.¨

¨There can be no doubt that, at times, powerful local castellans became uncontrolled local tyrants, their castles the bases for all sorts of crime: plunder, rapine, enslavement, theft.¨

¨The motives of crusaders were mixed, but usually involved some element of religious drive: from Tancred, who was anxious about squaring a warrior´s life with a Christian conscience...to those benighted souls on the People´s Crusade who set out in the train of a goose which they believed had been inspired by God.¨

¨Something of the puritanical and self-denying elements to be found in medieval monasticism, was also to be seen in the make-up of crusaders: deprivation on behalf of God became a virtue. It helps to explain how on the First Crusade men were able to survive the most diabolical of conditions. The urge to punish the body for the sake of he soul is to be found, for example, in the practice of voluntary branding with crosses. Of course there were crusaders who ignored this; there were some who wallowed in sin, and were as un-Christian in their conduct as it is possible to imagine, but we find time and again an encouragement on crusade to good moral conduct, and a condemnation and punishment of misconduct.¨

¨The Moslems, like the Christians, believed that God was on their side.¨

¨Iberia [was] .. invaded by the Moslems in the eighth century, and taken over by them. An Islamic state [was] ... established, which had grown into the independent emirate of Cordoba, making that town the largest in western Europe in the tenth century. In 929 was set up the independent Umayyad caliphate, and this survived until 1031. It was the collapse of the caliphate which offered Christendom its opportunity. Iberia disintegrated into small and relatively weak local units, the twenty-three taifa kingdoms. The small Christian kingdoms in the north were now able to hold their own and attempt expansion.¨

¨...the Reconquest was completed by 1492 with the taking of Granada.¨

¨What marks out the thirteenth century in western Europe is the increased power of the monarchies relative to their subjects.¨

¨...on the whole peace and order improved within the domains of the great kings, private warfare diminished, and much of the opposition and warfare, including siege warfare, tended to come less from conflicts between kings and their internal vassals, than from external powers with equivalent resources.¨

¨...more often opposition to the kings within their kingdoms was likely to take other and more hopeful forms, as through the pressure of national assemblies.¨

¨The crusade was proclaimed in 1208, and recruiting began in the following year. Northerners moved into southern France, determined to exterminate the [Albigensian] heresy which was seen by the papacy as an abomination, and at the same time to gain lands for themselves.¨

¨Much of England´s war effort in this period arose from the conflicts with France. As with France, the monarchy´s resources increased, and internal wars tended to decrease.¨

¨The [English siege] engines were pushed to the edge of the ditch [at Caerlaverock Castle, in Scotland, in July of 1300], and the king [Edward I] demanded to be allowed in by the bridge; the defenders responded with a hail of stones.¨

¨[Edward II´s] ... power was far from negligible, and a recent biographer believes that he became a tyrant, instituting ´ten years of terror.´¨

¨Early on Edward [III] tried to operate indirectly in Scotland by giving encouragement to those disinherited Scots who wished to recover their own ... and by supporting the disaffected Edward Bruce against his brother Robert.¨

¨...in the long run, Edward had to abandon plans for the conquest, and Scotland retained its independence; greater resources allied to military ability were not always enough. It is a foretaste of a trend in the later middle ages in Europe, which would see several great nations humbled by relatively poor but highly motivated national armies.¨

¨Without Frederick himself, his territories split up, his family squabbled amongst itself. Germany fell to other families, Sicily to other nations, and Italy was divided amongst its own cities.¨

¨Stability in the West, which had been hard won by the great kings, was disrupted in the last two centuries of the middle ages. Old threats to peace emerged in new guises: most often through the power of over-mighty vassals, who in this period Keen has called the super-nobility, sometimes in alliance with external enemies. The greatest conflict of this age in the West was the Hundred Years War, which saw a combination of these two threats, given substance by a very old cause of trouble, a succession dispute.¨

¨Meanwhile, in the Holy Roman Empire civil war was followed by a failure to maintain imperial authority over towns or nobles, and the later middle ages saw the disintegration of the empire. The political situation of the later middle ages was worsened by the succession of inadequate men to the thrones of England and France.¨

¨The backcloth to the political struggle was the disruption which would have occurred anyway, brought on by the economic difficulties from the Black Death and the agricultural depression, followed by population decline and social change, which came near to revolution in mainly abortive peasant risings.¨

¨There were those who came to rely for a living on the occupation of war, who feared peace.¨

¨The fourteenth century was truly disastrous, with economic troubles from famine and bad weather, added to the catastrophic effects of the Black Death. Population dropped dramatically, and farms, especially on poorer soils, were abandoned. In the wake of this came peasant discontent and rebellion throughout Europe.¨

¨...as with Edward III, the main thrust to renewing the war came from England; politically such aggression in the middle ages tended to make good sense, so long at least as it resulted in success.¨

¨Popular attachment was an important factor in this period, and it ran against England, as at Dieppe where the people rebelled against their English masters.¨

¨The history of the Holy Roman Empire in the late middle ages is one of disintegration. Central power eroded, and a plethora of smaller units emerged. Whatever unity had once existed between Germany and Italy, and it had never been much more than a personal power connection of certain emperors, had now disappeared. An opportunity was given for the rise of lesser men, of national units, and of cities.¨

¨...the difference between France and Germany: in the latter, the weaker central authority still allowed much local disorder so that lesser men with moderate territories could act independently and defy authority. It had now become impossible in France for thirty knights in one small castle to stand against royal power, but it was not so in Germany...¨

¨In one conflict [in Germany] in 1456, no less than sixty villages were burned in one day. It is no wonder that Germany witnessed numerous peasant risings in the fifteenth century.¨

¨Italy, like Germany, suffered from the decline of imperial central authority, and saw a growth in the power of the cities. In Italy there followed the development of small states around many of the cities, a handful of which gradually won dominance over their neighbors. The late medieval and early modern period saw the amazing cultural flowering in Italy of the Renaissance, but socially and politically it proved a difficult time, with the city states vying against each other, and external nation states, particularly Aragon and France, seeking to profit from Italy´s weakness. Hence it was ideal ground for soldiers of fortune..."

¨Late medieval Italy was a dangerous political quicksand; careers were made and broken in a moment, but military ability remained a constantly useful attribute, and skill in siege warfare was one of the most valued. Hence the great encouragement to military study, as may be noted for example in the drawings of Leonardo da Vinci.¨

¨...the greatest struggle of this period...saw the end of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem and the fall of the Byzantine Empire.¨

[Brian Wilkerson · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a textbook I kept from a college class because I thought it would be useful reference material. I didn't read a tenth of it at the time because there was enough time for it. Anyway, I finished it the other day.

This book traces a path in siege warfare in Europe and western Asia (the Middle East etc.) from the end of the Roman Period through the Reformation (around the end of the 1400s). It deals with tactics, equipment, and the social/political/religious stuff involved with sieges themselves.

I like the beginning and ending of this book; no that is not a backhanded compliment.

The first several chapters have great information pertaining to siege warfare. It talks about sieges in detail, and also generally. That is, the course of a typical siege. It compares between Roman, post-Roman and "barbarian" methods and equipment. There is a lot of information in particular about the Viking period. The background of sieges is explored: logistics, maintenance of fortifications, internal affairs and external relations etc.

There is a lot of stuff that I find useful and what I would expect to find in a book that deals exclusively with sieges.

The middle chapters are more about general history. To grossly oversimplify, it is a list of names and places and results. I imagine I could find similar information in any book about the crusading period or the Hundred Years War, or even an online thing like Wikipedia. The density of siege details is lower. They're still useful, but between the chapters before and the chapters later, they feel superfluous.

The later chapters reverse this trend. They are a chapter about siege equipment and a chapter about siege conduct and customs. It is compact stuff about throwing machines, mining, and "dirty tricks", that is followed by even more informative siege conduct, surrender terms, and the evolution in what was done and what was acceptable, as seen by chroniclers over time.

Trickster Eric Novels gives "The Medieval Siege" by Jim Bradbury a B+

[AskHistorians]

Sieges were the dominant form of medieval warfare and this is one of the first dedicated studies of how they changed. It is fairly biased towards high and late medieval sieges.

[Dave Ciskowski · Rating 4 out of 5]

An entertaining and comprehensive survey of medieval siege warfare, from around 450 CE to the fall of Constantinople in 1453. The first eight chapters are devoted to review of sieges, sorted by period and region. Bradbury provides a broad survey of practice, with illuminating details, as well as delving into detailed discussion of a few major sieges. He uses these references to both provide interesting anecdotes and to weave together themes on the conduct of siege attack and defense. The last two chapters are devoted to a more specific review of siege weaponry and practice. The anecdotes he covers here are in some cases repeats of material he’s used before, but the context shows them in a new light. The overall result is a historical narrative that strikes a good balance between painting memorable images of siege warfare, and discussing where siege practice both can and cannot be generalized. As a lay reader, the book was enjoyable, vivid, and informative.

[DoctorM · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent history of medieval sieges, from Scotland to Syria. Well-written, well-researched. My only criticism is that the siege accounts could've used more diagrams and maps, and the book would've profited from more attention to the techniques for the investment and siege of cities and fortified towns.

[RDax Adams · Rating 5 out of 5]

A quick romp thru medieval history focusing on the sieges, followed by a good description of siege weapons and tactics. All in an easy-to-read style with lots of illustrations. If you re at all interested in siege warfare get a copy.

[Trevor · Rating 1 out of 5]

Terrible scholarship. Uses exclusively narrative sources without any qualifications why he accepts any given account over another. Wholeheartedly believes ridiculous stories. Distorts ideas of Roman continuity as well as the general conduct of war, to create something akin to the early modern period, where everything was very well organized and thought out. Frequent hyperbole and typographical errors make it unbearable.

The only reasonable works on sieges are:
Rogers' Latin Crusades
Contamine's War in the Middle Ages (chapters on siege warfare)
DeVries' various articles

I've not yet seen Purton's monographs on the subject, but considering he's not professionally trained, I would venture that they are just a bit more expanded than Bradbury, but probably won't bring anything new to the table.

[Eric Pecile · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very strong survey of medieval siege techniques encompassing both offensive and defensive tactics. Other reviews comment on the book being shallow; I think this is to be expected in any survey history. As such, this book succeeds in its purpose of creating a general image of the medieval siege.