Martial Culture in Medieval Towns

Amidst an ongoing historiographical fascination with the long term causes of Europe’s global economic ascendency, and with the origins of the modern state system, the role of military capability been gaining attention. It is furthermore now generally agreed that the technological, tactical and societal changes giving rise to increasingly large, costly, well-organized and equipped military forces in the early modern period emerged out of gradual evolution over prior centuries, rather than as a “military revolution” by which small bands of lightly armed feudal knights, stone fortifications, and long sieges were swiftly eclipsed by huge infantries, firearms, cannonry and centralized political control. The crucial reinforcing role of urbanization in economic growth, state formation, and military development has also been underscored by recent studies, as has the noteworthy catalytic role of late medieval wars and of Swiss foot soldiers in exemplifying these trends. As yet little studied, however, have been local level archival sources documenting the organization of fighting forces, institutional support, and weaponry, and the bottom-up mechanisms by which military capabilities were constituted, maintained, and adapted over time, and how, in practical application, these developments interacted with the rise of urban centers. The goal of this multi-pronged research project will thus be to systematically uncover and explicate vital, yet so far only lightly and sporadically explored, connections between the military history and urban history of the medieval Swiss regions.

The research will be carried out by three independent, but connected subprojects with a common point of reference in the town-dweller who owned and used military weapons. It will concentrate on towns in the centre of the European urban belt in what is today Switzerland and southern Germany, from the 13th to the early decades of the 16th century. Subproject 1 will investigate urban public festivals as hubs of communication on martial knowledge and expressions of urban active self-promotion. Subproject 2 will address how urban military organization changed with shifting political circumstances and analyse the social effects of these changes. Subproject 3 will investigate how buildings and urban space used for military purposes changed the towns’ appearance, and how this, in turn, impacted local martial culture. We anticipate that these subprojects will contribute to an improved and expanded understanding of how martial culture became a driving force of urban development in the late middle ages, and how this, in turn, influenced state building on a European scale.

Public festivals, martial display and knowledge transfer in towns of the German Empire, especially in the Swiss lands

Subproject 1 will investigate the evolution and use of urban public festivals encompassing shooting competitions and other public displays of skills useful to the citizen-soldier. These festivals were stages for representation and promotion of urban honour and military prowess, and functioned as hubs of communication concerning martial knowledge. A comprehensive investigation of these events in the late middle ages, and of the people promoting, organising, participating in, and profiting from them, will shed light on the each of these elements and how they interrelated, and will enable a tracking of the ways individual expressions of martial urban cultures merged to form regional patterns.

As Schaufelberger showed, martial competition played a central role in the military training of citizens in the 16th century. Further evidence suggests that such competitions took place as early as the beginning of the 15th century, across a broad network of towns. In a first step, a list of such events will be established and as much information as possible gathered on the people involved in organising as well as participating in these events.

The events thus isolated will undergo sequential analysis, i.e. each procedural step from planning to execution and postprocessing will be connected to the groups of people involved in order to establish a basis for comparative analysis between towns. As a third step, this information about the practical, political, martial, and communicative aspects of these events will be analyzed with norms and forms of representation by integrating technical manuals, material culture, and of the material gathered and its comparison with secondary sources: technical literature, material culture, and iconography.

Martial associations (guilds and brotherhoods) were, from the late 14th century onwards, composed of citizens and inhabitants. Both groups were responsible for urban internal security on the basis of their rights of citizenship or of habitation, and weapon ownership was regulated according to legal status. Studies of early modern French, Swiss, and Dutch towns point to ‘games’ played within these associations and connect them to military training. Swiss historiography, however, still tends to assume that citizen soldiers did not need any training because the simple weapons they used allowed them to ‘learn on the spot’. Material evidence, and information on the organization of the urban armies of the period, however, suggest that there was at least occasional active training of town-dwelling soldiers even for the period before the Burgundian wars.

The planned sub-project intends to determine the role played by the town within these networks of martial experts, martial associations of inhabitants or citizen, and urban competitions. Based on the earlier research of Schaufelberger (1972), and the more recent research of Jaquet (fencing) and Delle Luche (shooting), we plan extensive research on the martial activities in the late 14th to the early 16th centuries within a representative group of cities (selected based on earlier research, state of archive and pre-project archival sweep). The first research phase will focus on archival investigation (Ratsprotokolle, accounting, and documents produced in and around these martial activities), identification of networks of actors, and categorisation of martial events (competition, festival, training). In the second phase the procedural and ritual development of martial activities will be ascertained and sketched, along with the related role played by the town. This will also allow us to (a) draw parallels and distinctions between the Swiss lands compared to later periods and other areas better investigated (low countries), and (b) investigate connections between urban martial activities and warfare, and (c) lastly, to connect this document-based research to analyses on material culture (weapons, banners, clothing) and to technical literature on how to shoot or to fence (as demonstrated in a prior case study of Solothurn).

Towns' military organization in the Romandie: the case of Freiburg in Üechtland.

Subproject 2 studies the institutional, operational and material aspects of medieval towns’ military organization in the light of changing political circumstances, limited to the actual French speaking part of Switzerland – the Romandie. A particular focus will be given to the city of Fribourg, which state archives hold more than 200 documents linked to the city’s military activities. This study will thus be two sided, with a comparative analysis of towns’ military organization in the Romandie and a focus on the operational aspects of Freiburg’s military forces.

A particular spotlight will be directed at the citizens' and inhabitants' involvement in the city's military organization. This duty was part of the citizens' status and was defined by charters, which had to be recognized by the lord. Other documents – such as expedition lists, inventories and city accountability – will provide information on the practical aspects of the citizens' and inhabitants' involvement. Studying these documents will allow to explore several hypotheses, mainly that of the military organization as a result of negotiations between the town and the lord and of a tendency to adopt the same structure as the town's social organization.

To study expedition lists and equipment inventories, I have chosen a quantitative method. Working with several datasets organized in spreadsheets enables the analysis of several relations, such as the possession of armor or horses according to wealth, or the involvement of individuals in military expeditions over time.

The towns' military organization has not yet been studied comparatively. Neither the practical organization of urban military organization within changing political environments has ever been explored in a systematic, comparative way. This study will thus address this relation between political change and military organization, not only between the town and its lord, but also the prerogatives of towns as rulers on their nearby lands.

Dynamics of martial culture and the transformation of urban space

Subproject 3 will center on physical changes in the late medieval urban fabric. The combined effect of technical innovations (e.g. rise of long range weapons, including fire-arms), organizational changes and societal developments was a marked alteration in the character and layout of urban spaces, buildings and walls subject to military use. New building types (arsenals, armories, power houses), and areas cleared for shooting-ranges and town squares reshaped the physical appearance of 15th century towns considerably. The subproject will also probe resulting changes in the way urban space was experienced and, in turn, impacts upon urban martial culture generally.

Late medieval towns were physically transformed as the direct or indirect result of changes in military techniques and organization. Four phenomena (which have had only limited and uneven previous scholarly attention), will to be explored and connected to the question of urban martial culture: town walls as defining features of the medieval towns; the shift from scattered Waffenkammern and private weapon storage to prominent, permanent and public urban arsenals specifically used for the central storing, repairing, and distributing of weapons and armour; the appearance of buildings and open space dedicated specifically to military practice on town outskirts (Schützenhäuser, Schützenwiese), and the creation of new town squares available for military uses.

This subproject will investigate the overall impact of urban martial culture on the physical development of towns, and seek thereby to integrate military history into an important broader historiographical discourse on the interplay of physical and social ‘spaces’ in medieval towns.

SNF-Forschungsstipendiat:innen

• M.A. Elena Magli, Doktorandin
• M.A. Mathijs Christian Roelofsen, Assoziierter Forscher