Innholdsfortegnelse for MW X1.1 i Medieval World Culture & Conflict Magazine

The establishment and success of the Vandal kingdom is inseparably tied to the internal dissensions and external threats plaguing the Roman Empire. Uprooted by Roman civil war and by pressure from the Goths, the Vandals left their Danubian lands to invade Gaul in the early fifth century, before crossing the Pyrenees circa October AD 409. The greater portion of the Iberian Peninsula was soon divided among the invaders. It also gave them control over the Strait of Gibraltar. The Vandals soon coveted the land across the strait, Mauretania Tingitana, an equally rich landscape with close cultural and economic ties to southern Spain. What eventually became a full-scale migration unfolded over several years as a series of amphibious landings to establish footholds in Tingitana. These moves were simplified by the fact…

The Picatrix even offers ways to pray to each of the planets, so that one could gain their favour. The act of praying to Mars is quite elaborate – the person must first pick a favourable time and go to a remote place. He must be wearing all red clothing, have a sword around his neck and a bronze ring on his finger, and be carrying as many weapons as possible. Then he must set a fire in a bronze censer and throw into it specially made pills. The text describes these pills as made of “equal parts of wormwood, aloe, squinancywort, spurge, large pepper, and watercress” – with some human blood added in as well. Once this is done and the smoke is rising from the censer, he can…

While tower houses are often described as small castles, they varied quite a bit in size. Those on the smaller end of the scale could be six by five metres in plan with a height rising to over twelve metres. They could be much bigger than this, though. For instance, you might have heard the phrase “kissing the Blarney stone,” but did you know that the Blarney stone is housed in the parapets of its namesake cas tle – that is, the tower house called Blarney Castle in Ireland? Even many visitors to this heritage tourism site don’t realize it is a tower house as it is a commanding structure: an L-shaped plan comprised of two connected towers (the earlier tower is 6.5m by 6.8 m, and the later was…

An unique suit of armour will have a new permanent home in Krakow, Poland, after being given by the Hungarian government to counterparts in Poland. Made in 1533, it was originally given to the future Polish king Sigismund II August (1548-1572) as an engagement gift from Ferdinand I, King of Bohemia and Hungary (1526-1564). This suit of armour, designed to fit a thirteen-year-old boy, was made by Jörg Seusenhofer. It found its way to the Imperial Viennese collections, and then into the collections of the Hungarian National Museum. It will now be on display at Wawel Castle.…

First we will look at the role these soldiers played. The need to have mobile troops was an essential part of warfare. Reaching a location of tactical and strategic value was crucial to winning a battle and a war. In much of Europe, the heavy cavalry had the advantage of mobility, while most of the crossbowmen were on foot and therefore could be much slower to reach these destinations. While mounted archers had been in use in parts of Europe and Asia for many centuries, much of Western Europe lacked a tradition of this nature. By mounting crossbowmen, a troop type that was largely infantry, they now gained a larger strategic and tactical advantage that came with mobility. In this case, the mounted crossbowmen could arrive along with other mounted…

In reality, the pattern of fortifications that emerged was far less the product of centralized planning than it was the result of a collection of independent and self-interested actions, while the matter of where castles were sited often had little to do with what we might now regard as geopolitical defensive planning. The great castles of the period were far too expensive for a king or prince to implement a defensive strategy that relied on the construction of a number of large strongholds; instead, the pattern of castles that developed across the Levant was the result of a piecemeal process that involved numerous figures. But the question remains: why were the castles built by the Franks constructed where they were? Although there was a unique set of variables responsible for…

It began when Owain, the proclaimed prince of Wales, led a sweeping chevauchée through English holdings in southern Wales and the borderlands. In the process, his Welsh force — a few hundred men at most – struck the town of Knighton on the River Teme, just ten miles west of Mortimer’s castle at Wigmore, and only seven more from his family’s seat of power at Ludlow Castle. Mortimer, no doubt in some panic, summoned his men. Perhaps 1500 answered the call, and they marched up the valley to push the raiders out. No source mentions a fight at Knighton. It seems the Welsh were initially content to take their spoils and retreat. Somewhat rare among medieval battles, the battlefield at Bryn Glas can be localized to at most a square…

About 25 years ago, I attended my first ever academic conference — the International Congress on Medieval Studies, which is held annually at Western Michigan University. One of my most vivid memories from that conference was attending a session entitled “The Longbow: Effects and Efficacy: A Roundtable Debate” with Kelly DeVries and Clifford Rogers. It took place in a room that could comfortably accommodate 30 people, but about twice that were in attendance, with several sitting in the aisle. It was a lively session, where Kelly and Cliff were debating the use of longbows among the English in the fourteenth century, particularly at the Battle of Crecy. Both historians noted that this weapon was vital to the English victory here, and in several other engagements against the French and Scots,…

Put simply – and it is simplistic — the Stirrup Thesis argued that when the Franks discovered the stirrup in the eighth century, they used it to develop a new form of mounted shock combat with the couched lance, made cavalry the dominant military arm and knights the backbone of the military aristocracy (and that then led to a wholesale r/evolution in society to support the horseowning aristocracy that gets shorthanded in another quasi-mythical concept, ‘feudalism’), and promptly turned back the Umayyad invasion of Gaul from the Iberian Peninsula, thus securing Europe for Christendom. The problem is, almost all of this is wrong except for Charles Martel winning the Battle of Tours in 732 (also known as the Battle of Poitiers and the Battle of the Highway of the Martyrs…

Hasselt, a picturesque town in the north of the Netherlands, has been a city since 1227. It is now stranded inland, but in the Middle Ages it was a port on a tributary of the Ijssel River, within easy reach of the sea, and important enough to be a member of the Hanseatic League. You can still see traces of its medieval walls round the town, but we have come to see a different aspect of Hasselt’s defences – we are making for the Town Hall, built in the mid-sixteenth century but housing today an important collection of something a little older. So, what was the object of this journey? One of the most important and interesting collections, some fourteen in all, of medieval handguns is preserved in the town…