The Albigensian Crusade lasted for twenty years, from the original mobilization and march of the crusading army to the treaty which finally ended hostilities. Naturally, for the greater part of this long period there was no heavy fighting, the resources of the opponents could not have supported any such continuous performance; indeed throughout considerable intervals there seems to have been no actual fighting at all. Nevertheless, for twenty years there were hostile forces in being and a state of war existed.
The chief single episode of these twenty years is the astonishing battle of Muret. It will be best, therefore, to consider separately, first the earlier stages of the war, and second the campaign of Muret and the subsequent events which that action made possible.
The early war falls naturally into two periods of unequal length. The first, of only two months, comprises the original crusading march with its overwhelming numbers, and the capture of Beziers and Carcassonne. It ends with the appointment of Simon de Montfort to govern the conquered territories, and the return of the great majority of Crusaders to their homes. The second period lasts for four years. Throughout this time de Montfort commands the Crusade, maintains a government in Languedoc, and extends his power. This he does, in spite of his slender resources, by virtue of high personal ability. The period ends with the military intervention of King Pedro of Aragon against the Crusade, and the general expectation that de Montfort, with his greatly inferior forces, would be annihilated forthwith.
All warfare, it is axiomatic, is merely a means to a political end. One group attempts to impose its will upon another which asserts a contrary will of its own and resists.
We have seen in the first chapter that the Middle Ages were politically decentralized to a high degree, but that, on the other hand, they had a strong sense of moral unity. Christendom was one big family. Mediæval warfare was conditioned by these two political factors. On account of decentralization in all its forms, the central governments had only a slight power to compel the entire body of their nominal subjects to move, irrespective of the individual wills of those subjects with regard to the particular matter in dispute; slight, that is, compared with the power of modern governments. On account both of decentralization and also of the moral unity of Christendom, wars between Christian men in the Middle Ages seldom involved any great point of principle. There could be no opposition between different and mutually exclusive types of civilization, as between the French and German types to-day. Usually the dispute concerned merely the opposing claims of two parties to ownership of, and therefore feudal administration over, a patch of land. Accordingly campaigns were apt to be short and inconclusive, and warfare in general somewhat of an adventurous sport. It is true that in the thirteenth century, a time still simple, war had not yet taken on the unreality of aim and the elaborate trappings which are the mark of the later Middle Ages. Already, however, it had become something of a “gentleman’s game,” as were the dynastic wars of the eighteenth century. Naturally, therefore, when a vital principle was involved (as in the Crusade which we are about to study), operations were always tending to relapse into the haphazard fashion fostered by the contemporary idea of war as an affair in which nothing of great moment to society as a whole was at stake.
As far as the technique of operations is concerned, the important features are mail-clad cavalry and permanent fortification. Axiomatically, infantry is worth more than cavalry in combats between disciplined bodies of troops, but less than cavalry in raids and in defence against raids, as in our own Indian wars, and in the Boer War. Thus, in late Roman times and the Dark Ages, cavalry gradually became preponderant over infantry, throughout the greater part of Europe. The Franks who ended by setting up their chieftain as successor to the Western Emperors, were an exception. It was not until the great Viking harry of the ninth century, in which our tradition almost went under, that the defenders of “Francia” began to rely mainly upon cavalry. That arm alone was fast enough to overtake the pirates whose first act on landing was to steal horses for themselves. And it was in the repulse of the Viking, as we have seen, that mediæval society crystallized.
Fortified points, as well as cavalry, take on additional importance when the resources of one’s opponent seldom permit him to sit down before them and maintain a blockade and regular siege for a long time. A great deal of nonsense has been talked about the “impregnability” of fortification before the discovery of gunpowder. Any man acquainted with military things knows that, even irrespective of blockade, any fortress must fall before besiegers in sufficient numbers and possessed of armament and engineering skill equal to the defenders, unless the defence can receive relief from outside. Thus Philip Augustus took Chateau Gaillard, the strongest fortress of its time, not by blockade but by regular siege.
On the other hand, it has been truly observed that mediæval commanders of Philip’s type, and with his resources, were rare. The value of fortification is that it gains time, and few men of the Middle Ages had their troops well enough in hand to hold them long at the monotonous drudgery of siege work—even if they had resources sufficient to keep their force continuously in being at all. The well-provisioned fortress could usually count on starving out its besiegers before being starved out itself. Accordingly, if one party to a quarrel felt himself to be weaker than his enemy, he was apt to shut himself up promptly behind walls.
Furthermore, fortifications played a large part in mediæval warfare because a fortress covering only a small area could resist a regular siege as well as one of great extent. The importance of comparatively small fortified points, that is of castles, sprang from the lack of missile weapons capable of battering down stone walls. Obviously, as the power, accuracy, and effective range of missile weapons increase, the circumference of the first-class fortress must correspondingly increase if it is to escape being overwhelmed by the converging fire of the greater number of engines which the concentric position of the besiegers enables them to bring to bear upon it. Conversely, when the problem (as in the Middle Ages) is of close-in defence only, the area to be defended matters little with reference to the siege work involved. Whereas, on the other hand, the expense of construction mounts as the circumference to be fortified increases. The resources of the besiegers were sapping or battering the base of the walls; or escalade from behind the cover of movable towers which could be set up out of range, and then rolled up so as to let down drawbridges on a level with the battlements.
Finally, the mediæval was no fool. I have made this point in my first chapter; nevertheless, I repeat it here. We have seen that the importance of cavalry and of fortification, especially of castles (i.e., small highly-fortified points) resulted not from folly, but from the conditions of the time. Social and political conditions, again, were unfavorable to regular discipline, but no more so than in our own American Revolution. Less so, in fact. It is true that there was no regular study of war as an art. Nevertheless, our modern staff colleges could not easily improve on the decisions of many mediæval commanders. Even the lack of maps on which modern staff work is built up did not necessarily blind the eye of the commander operating in familiar or partially friendly country.