Saturday, November 9, 2013

Aftermath of Agincourt and a 2nd Tread - the Centuries of Retreat and Retrenchment in Spain, prior to 1492


Agincourt and its Aftermath (time for a bit'o history):


Medieval France was the apex of the idea of the knight errant. Here, nobles were the sons of landed gentry, held to loyalty and the frequent call to arms by oaths in exchange for royal sanction to their ancient claims to land. The most serious of these young men were invited into the semi-secret order of knighthood, which required horsemanship, the veneration of weaponry, a degree of hazing by more senior knights and the ceremonial swearing of an oath to redress wrongs by taking on criminals and enemies of the Crown.

The sons of "nobility" were encouraged to practice personal war-making skills, perfected and conducted on horseback. 

No nobleman's son would go into battle on foot; this was the lethal place of the farm laborer and sometime soldier. "The foot" might be practiced and even effective as a lanceman or even as a crossbowman but "the foot" risked far greater danger from comparably skilled opponents; mounted enemy cavalry could attack foot soldiers directly or from the flank. 

For part of the important background in which Cervantes wrote, one looks to the century-long war between England and France, which culminated in France, on the field at Agincourt, October 25, 1415.

At Agincourt, a smaller, hired for pay, disciplined and brilliantly led English army destroyed a much larger French force composed of knights on horseback as well as crossbow men, apparently imported from Italy. 

Although the French nobility were called in fealty, the French labor class was compelled to service as a duty  to the landed gentry, on whose property they lived and worked. Actual fighting skill and individual loyalty to the king were secondary factors, as was the proper feeding and equipping of the force. 

In theory all this was also true in England, but prior to the battle at Agincourt, King Henry V had crossed the Channel with several thousand soldiers, who had fought together in Wales, against rebels and who had honed their skills in exchange for pay and the promise of further pay well as a chance for continental spoils greater than were to be had in the Welch countryside.

At Agincourt, French morale was high, owing to the overwhelming numerical advantage - 3/1 - the French noble class enjoyed over the English largely labor-class army, which French nobles considered to be socially and therefore, also, militarily, their inferiors.

In the centuries before Agincourt, encounters between lined up knights were part of the sedate art of medieval war. Such battles sometimes included a single charge by mounted cavaliers, who might kill or be killed but who, if captured, could be housed as guests in a nearby castle until a ransom could be worked out. 

At Agincourt, the English had their own force of knights, who as some historians assert, were ordered to conduct repeated charges into the French lines

But the decisive gory blows were struck at a distance by the English longbowmen, and then close up as the bowmen took up dagger and sword and attacked impetuous French knights, who ran into battle on foot, since the soggy ground did not permit a second mounted charge, after the first had failed and laid the small field full of the bodies of horses, corpses and the dying.

The headlong French knights, weighed down by their armour, were cut to pieces first by arrows and then in hand-to-hand combat by the numerically smaller but more maneuverable English soldiers.

The English took thousands of prisoners but when a French counter-attack of late-arriving French knights came close to capturing King Henry V, he ordered prisoners to be killed, to keep them from again, joining the battle. 

Contrary to the ancient chivalric code, two thousand French knights were hacked or burned to death at Agincourt.

The battle at Agincourt brought to its final end whatever actual reality might have been possessed by the gentlemanly rules of medieval chivalry. 

Agincourt has been called, "the last pitch battle of the medieval age, in which valor in combat would prove no match for a ruthless war machine." (See source, below.)

The notion of the mounted gentlemen - fighting only other mounted gentlemen in a single forrey before capture and ransom - that illusion took a hit in a torrent of French blood at Agincourt in the early fifteenth century. 

After Agincourt, jousts were staged only as pantomime of an actual battle or as a test of horsemanship in court-sponsored celebrations. 

In the century after Agincourt, nostalgia seems to have set in among the still-ruling classes of western Europe. Spain was not exempt. (This reminds me of the "lost cause" romances which masqueraded as history, that erupted into print in the defeated US South in the 2-3 generations after the American Civil War.)

In the sixteenth century, Spanish fanticests created immense, popular tomes, which invoked the romance of chivalry. 

Cervantes published his ridicule-corrective two hundred years after Agincourt.

Cervantes, sometime soldier, prisoner-of-war and tax-agent of the state, wants to call Spain into the more modern world of real politique and the developing machinery of war.

The novel's modern form, invented by Cervantes in his tale of a demented petty noble at war with the world around him, is a one thousand page, slow motion, call to rational arms. 

Spain, despite the collapse into fantasy of the old pretensions, with the cruelest being - the nobles have everyone's best interests in mind - Spain is still ruled by a pompous, predatory and stratified social order, which just may be as out-of-date as the long-gone and never actually real, order of the knight-errant. 

Source for the quote (above):

Film "The Battle of Agincourt, Oct 25 1415"

The promised 2nd Thread - the Centuries of Retreat and Retrenchment in Spain, prior to 1492 - will await the next post.

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