Mortgarten - another battle anniversary

[Erpingham]

The 700th anniversary of the battle of Morgarten, when the Swiss ambushed the Austrians, has just passed :

http://www.medievalists.net/2015/11/15/the-700th-anniversary-of-the-battle-of-morgarten/



Some interesting links if you follow them through.  Katherine Becker's thesis, mentioned in the article, is downloadable here

https://etd.ohiolink.edu/ap/10?0::NO:10:P10_ETD_SUBID:69086#abstract-files

[Duncan Head]

The Becker thesis is indeed interesting, and on a quick scan through it gives citations for a number of things that I've seen referred to but never know the exact basis for - the claim that there were already pikemen among the Schwyzers at Morgarten, the decrees trying to increase the proportion of pikemen in the early 15th century, and even the alternating of pikemen and goedendag/plancon men at Courtrai! She goes astray a few times when discussing the Roman period, but none of that really impacts her main thesis even if translating "gaesati" as "pikemen" does jar! The basic thesis that "the fully-formed Swiss phalanxes evolved out of the battlefield experience of the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries" rather than by some direct continuity of classical practice, or even a direct revival, must be correct - even if "the Swiss might have discovered the Macedonian texts" before 1500.

[Erpingham]

That's quick reading even by your standards Duncan

[Duncan Head]

I can't claim to have read every word, and certainly not to have followed up references.  But thanks for finding that thesis, it's a useful piece of work.

[Erpingham]

Well, it acted as a spur for me to also quick read it.  It is interesting but there are points where I wish she would have quoted a little more from source documents, especially around the chronology of the switch to pikes.  I'd love to have had the translated texts of the military ordinances from the early 15th century too. 

I think her central ideas are probably right - that the Swiss Way of War is an outgrowth of a wider European post Roman models developing in response to tactical stimuli but she could probably have done more to really draw that out.

I was struck again by the fact that we tend to have fixed in our minds the later pike-block Swiss and the early Swiss, running around on difficult terrain, are quite different.  One other feature I think I'll tease out into a separate thread.