Page 148 - Conflitti Militari e Popolazioni Civili - Tomo I

148 XXXIV Congresso della CommIssIone InternazIonale dI storIa mIlItare • CIHm

This eyewitness testimony is again that of Jean de Venette. Also, when later the Parisians
fell out with Charles, Duke of Normandy, acting as regent for his captive father, they found
themselves besieged by their own countrymen as:
‘In all the country round about, misfortunes and losses due to certain nobles and freeboot-
ers were increasing more and more. Foulques de Laval with many Bretons plundered the
Beauce and set fire to many villages. He pillaged Etampes, which had already been taken and
burned once by freebooters like him, for the second time. The robbers came as far as Orleans
and beyond, so that no one dare take the road between the two places. Neither was the road
to Compiégne or anywhere else safe or secure.’ 5
‘Losses and injuries were inflicted by friend and foe alike upon the rural population and
upon monasteries standing in the open country. Everyone robbed them of their goods and
there was no one to defend them. For this reason many men and women, both secular and
religious were compelled on all sides to leave their abode and seek out the city … there was
not a monastery in the neighbourhood of Paris, however near, that was not driven by fear
of freebooters to enter the city or some other fortification, abandoning their buildings and,
‘Woe is me!’ leaving the divine offices unsung. This tribulation increased in volume, not only
around Paris but also in the neighbourhood of Orléans, Tours, Nantes in Brittany, Chartres,
and Le Mans, in an amazing way. Villages were burned and their population plundered. Men
hastened to the cities with their carts and their goods, their wives and their children, in lam-
entable fashion.’ 6
There is much here that is familiar to modern student of ‘total war’: the supportive struc-
tures of Church and State have collapsed; trade has been stifled; what would now be called
Internally Displaced People roam the land and flood towards the apparent protection of
towns; civil war and brigandage is rampant in the ensuing chaos; and even the quotidian
comforts of communal religious services have been lost amidst the confusion, adding to a
sense of moral collapse and loss of confidence in the social order. This situation goes to show
just how vulnerable was medieval society to the disorder that warfare often brings in its
train. So this begs the question just how common was this state of affairs, whether there was
anything distinctive about the nature of warfare half-a-millennium ago, and whether there are
any lessons that might be learnt from it today.
First there is the important assumption that a particular group in the society – the nobles
– had a unique responsibility for the maintenance of order through force of arms. In theory,
only those under the leadership of a legitimate ruler, the prince, had the right to conduct mili-
tary activity on account of their status. So, if it became apparent that they were failing in their
duties, then everything was cast into doubt about the validity of the social structure. Cer-
tainly, according to tracts such as the Tree of Battles, or the later work of Christine de Pisan,
a noblewoman and prolific authoress writing at the Burgundian court in the first decades of
the 15 century, warriors had an obligation to behave well towards others according to set
th
of categories. Other nobles they were required to capture rather than to kill and treat well in
captivity until a sufficient ransom had been raised to assure the prisoner’s liberty. This situa-
tion was the same for anyone with even the lowest title of rank right up to the king himself,

5 Ibid. p. 73.
6 Ibid. p. 75.