Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from A History of the Art of War: The Middle Ages From the Fourth to the Fourteenth Century
The present volume is intended to form the second of a series of four, in which I hope to give a general sketch of the history of the art of war from Greek and Roman times down to the beginning of the nineteenth century. The first volume will deal with classical antiquity; this, the second, covers the period between the downfall of the Roman Empire and the fourteenth century. In the third volume will be included the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries. The fourth will treat of the military history of the eighteenth century and of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars down to Waterloo.
These volumes are concerned with the history of the art of war, and do not purport to give the complete military annals of the civilised world. Each section deals with the characteristic tactics, strategy, and military organisation of a period, and illustrates them by detailed accounts of typical campaigns and battles. There are also chapters dealing with the siegecraft and fortification, the arms and armour of each age.
The present volume should in strict logic have included two more books, dealing the one with the military history of Central and Eastern Europe in the fourteenth century (especially with the first rise of the Swiss and the Ottoman Turks), and the other with the invention of gunpowder and firearms. But the exigencies of space - the volume is already more than six hundred and sixty pages long - have compelled me to relegate these topics to the opening chapters of the third volume.
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