Mind-Munitions

Chapter 4
The ‘Dark Ages’ to 1066
The slow and tortuous collapse of the Roman Empire in the west at
the hands of the Germanic invaders saw the disappearance of the
Roman legion as the principal instrument of warfare. With it went
the kind of organization and discipline that was in some ways a
substitute for morale-boosting. Islam, with its light cavalry, swept
west from Arabia to Spain and it was only long after the Franks
stopped the ‘heathen’ armies at the battle of Poitiers in 732 that
western Europe and Christianity were able to counter-attack in the
form of the Crusades. In the meantime, the Roman art of war was
replaced by the barbarians’ style of fighting. It was a style characterized
by speed, brutality, and improvization and motivated by the
very nature of barbarian society itself.
We do in fact often have less information about war and
communication in the so-called Dark Ages than we do about the
Roman period, with few surviving detailed descriptions of battles.
Roman sources would have us believe that chaos replaced order,
and there is little testimony to provide us with an alternative view.
But it would be a mistake to assume that, after the disastrous
Roman defeat by the Goths at Adrianople in 378, warfare became
less sophisticated and more chaotic. Many military historians see
Adrianople as a turning point, a point at which light cavalry
became more important than infantry (although the Romans had
used cavalry to some extent for centuries before). This process was
helped by the development of the stirrup in the eighth century
(though it had been used in China and the East for some time
before), which in turn encouraged the development of the heavy
cavalry units of knights that were to dominate warfare in
Christendom for the rest of the Middle Ages. The stirrup enabled