The Inquisition - A Political And Military Study Of Its Establishment. Hoffman Nickerson
documents of Sylvester in Migne, he might have been spared the contempt of all competent critics. As it is he preferred a legendary piece of nonsense in a piece of popular verse to exact history.
The motive through which Freeman invented this Bull was the motive of his place, time, and generation: hatred of the Catholic Church, that is, against the religion of the people with whom he was dealing, and a desire to satisfy the animus of his Victorian readers against the Papacy.
In contrast to nonsense of this kind, haphazard, ill-evidenced and invented history, note the admirable description you will read in the following pages of the battle of Muret.
Here is a real knowledge of ground and, what is more important, a careful estimate of time and movement. I know nothing better in the reconstruction of a mediasval battle than this first-rate piecing together of evidence through common sense upon the flanking surprise movement executed by Simon de Montfort against Foix’s division of the enemy at Muret. It is an unbreakable chain of calculation, and at the same time a full explanation of what happened. This piece of work, in the fifth chapter of the volume here presented to the reader, is as good as anything can be of its kind, and an excellent representative of that new, modern, accurate work now ridding us of the loose stuff which encumbered history through the past two generations. That is the way to reconstruct a mediæval battle in the absence of detailed evidence, to see the movements as they actually took place.
I have laid emphasis on this particular section of the book by way of contrast to the insufficiency of so typical a name as Freeman’s. I ought rather, perhaps, to turn to the book as a whole and then again to certain other specific points of excellence which have struck me.
Mr. Nickerson’s study is mainly concerned with explaining the nature of the early Inquisition; incidentally he gives us a very clear view of the Albigensian War, and what is especially remarkable in the clarity of his view is the arrangement of the episodes. I note that the author has done what is of first importance in all military chronicling, and that is, the division of episodes not in equal measures of time but by their separate military characteristics.
It is a principle too often forgotten even by professional military historians. A war may take twenty years, or fifty, or one. It may, by accident, divide itself naturally into two or three episodes of fairly equal length in time or it may by coincidence fall into episodes corresponding more or less with a successive series of years (e.g.,) Marlborough’s Campaigns in Flanders in the early eighteenth century). But much the greater part of military history is concerned with episodes which have no relation to such more or less equal time-chapters. The general rule is that three or four successive phases of a campaign (or battle) occupy the most disparate lengths of time. The proper way to treat military history is to give to the capital episodes their relative military importance; not, as in the case of a civilian chronicle, to weigh that importance by the time involved.
For instance, no one can read a clear account, however short, of the great European War without seeing it as a siege; it is therefore, like every siege (not raised, nor degenerated into a blockade) essentially divided into three episodes:—
(a) The preliminaries of containment, that is the war of movement prior to the establishment of siege conditions.
(b) The siege itself.
(c) The storming of the siege line and the collapse of the besieged.
Now if we were to take the Great War in years—1914, 1915, 1916, 1917, 1918 would appear. If we divide it into chapters of more or less equal lengths of time we have a confused, meaningless picture such as is given us by nearly all the popular histories as yet published of that great event. However much these accounts succeed in pleasing each its national audience they fail as histories because they think a month of war must be thirty times more important than a day and need thirty times as much telling. The moment we divide the Great War according to its military values the scheme falls into place and becomes clear. You have three divisions, of which you can make, if you like, three volumes or three chapters. The first is absurdly short in comparison with the length of the whole. It only seriously begins with the great shock of August 20, 21, 1914, in Lorraine and in Flanders, and it ends when the Germans went to earth less than a month later—on the Aisne. From that moment onward the war was a siege.
Next you get the second division, the completion of the siege lines in the West to the sea (which is over before the middle of November, two more months), and then the solid three and a half years of effort on the part of the besieged to break out in great sorties and on the part of the besiegers to break down the defence of the besieged.
In mere length of time this episode is prodigious and includes all the better known stories of the war. It lasts for over forty-four months and sees the collapse of Russia; the first sorties of the besieged Prussian alliance through Poland; the tremendous efforts made by the Allies to break the enemy’s siege-lines in Champagne, on the Somme, and in Flanders, on the Asiago plateau and on the terrible Carso Plateau in front of Trieste. It sees the failure of the attack on the siege wall at the postern of the Dardanelles, and even in remote Mesopotamia, as well as in the Balkans. It sees further great sorties, especially the violent struggles of the besieged at the end to get out of their net: Caporetto, St. Quentin, the Chemin des Dames. That second division ends on July 15, 1918, when the last effort of the besieged to get out was made against Gouraud and broken by him in front of Rheims. On July 18, 1918, three days later, the third division begins and lasts exactly four months to the Armistice on November 11. It is nothing but the successive breakdown of the defence, the crumbling of the siege wall and the collapse of the besieged.
See the Great War on these lines, and you see it clearly, as it was. Try to write of it by successive years, and you get nothing but a fog.
Now Mr. Nickerson has done exactly that right thing for the Albigensian War. He clearly divides the struggle into its military episodes; the first great rush; the long struggle of de Montfort; the curious but inevitable fruit of the whole business after de Montfort’s death in the lapse of the South to the crown of France, that is to the North.
In this connection one cannot praise too highly the simple and clear fashion in which the author has presented to the reader the real nature of mediæval warfare. There are two points to be established in which, I think, he has been permanently successful. First, in making the reader understand the narrow limits of time to which any effective work on a large scale by a powerful army was then confined. Secondly, the contrast between the feudal forces which were, as it were, normal to the times, and those supplementary mercenary forces, which, though they were not regarded by the time as normal, were the real backbone of all continuous military effort in the West. It is an idea which one might develop in many epochs of military history besides the Middle Ages. Over and over again a particular form of recruitment is regarded as normal and after use for some generations begins from causes inherent in itself to yield insufficient results; whereupon a supplementary form of recruitment, which for long continues to be regarded as exceptional, becomes, as the close observer may discover, the essential of the new fighting force, e.g., the Auxiliaries and the Legions after, say 180, and especially after 312.
It was one of the advantages of the English, by the way, in the later Middle Ages that the difficulty of transporting large feudal forces over the sea led to an early development of their mercenary forces and produced the highly trained professional bowmen who are the mark of the Hundred Years War.
Mr. Nickerson is also right in saying how considerable was the degree of military organization in the early thirteenth century.
Too often in military history anything earlier than the seventeenth century or the middle of the sixteenth is treated unscientifically by the writer, who seems to imagine that if he gets far enough back he can treat armies as herds moving about at random. The truth is of course that no great body of men ever so moved or could be moved without a high degree of organization, and that when you are dealing with the rapid movement of a very large body the organization must be nearly as detailed as it is to-day. There is a certain minimum of organization below which you cannot fall without breaking down, when it is a case of great bodies moving quickly; and that minimum is so high that it does not vary very much between the very first epochs of