Friday, July 15, 2005
The Muslim way of war circa 1571, part I
The first chapter discusses the military campaign that led to the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, in which a great fleet representing Christiandom thrashed the Ottoman galleys in one of the most important naval battles in history. The defeat at Lepanto was shocking to the Turks, but perhaps not surprising even after essentially 900 years of punctuated Muslim ascendancy. Wheatcroft explains why the Muslim military tradition was beginning to slip behind the West.
The battle at Lepanto would mark a defining moment in the struggle betweeen Christendom and Islam: on the Christian side, war was fast becoming secularized. Where once the pope had decreed (ineffectually) that the crossbow was not to be used in conflicts between Christians, now no barriers were placed on any engine of war, however frightful. The galleass [a huge Venetian galley, introduced to great effect at Lepanto - ed.] was remarkable not for its technology, but for the ease with which it was created, adopted, and immediately used in battle. In the Muslim ranks, by contrast, every innovation could become a matter for argument and even resistance. Honorable war was still fought with the weapons known to the Qur'an -- swords, spears, lances, bows and arrows. The good Muslim soldier was the man who leaped into the breach or onto the deck of an enemy vessel without armor and only the strength of his arms to protect him. Guns and artillery were necessary, but carried no mark of courage. Perhaps for this reason few of the developments and innovations in gun technology emerged in the Islamic world. Implicit if unstated was the general belief that it was better to fight in the right way and lose a battle than to fight without honor. Europeans might talk about traditions, caste, and honor, but quietly discarded them in practice -- occasions such as when officers courteously invited their enemy to fire first became legendary precisely because they were so rare. In contrast, the armies of "Islam" might adopt new weapons but were increasingly hobbled by their ancient ethic.
There is no sense in Wheatcroft's presentation that Muslim restraint was founded on the concern that modern weapons had excessive killing power (which presumably animinated the pope's aforementioned objection to the crossbow). Rather, the "good Muslim soldier" cared about killing with only weapons that were in circulation during the life of the Prophet. Still, the result of Muslim traditionalism was less lethality, even if it resulted in steady military decline.
It was only in the middle of the next century, after the horror of the Thirty Years War, that Europeans would begin to develop rules to limit the killing of civilians in war.
2 Comments:
By 
Chris, at
Sat Jul 16, 11:40:00 AM:
Victor Davis Hanson tackled this same issue in his "Carnage and Culture" using the Battle of Lepanto to illustrate how one of the key tenets of Western warmaking was unbridled technology, coupled with even a rudimentary market economy, producing constant innovation and improvement in weaponry. He also points out how the Muslim world had already begun to show signs of being the "sick man of Europe" because of their inability to innovate or improve readily, a situation that has only gotten worse since then.
By 
, at
Mon Jul 18, 07:10:00 AM:
The objection enshrined in the Papal Bull outlawing crossbows was not "excessive" killing power, for at the time death was death and recognized rightly as such no matter the manner accomplished. The crossbow offered for the first time the ability to kill an armored man (armor being because of its cost the exclusive domain of the nobility, or those to whom the nobility mobilize and issued armor to.) Unlike the longbow, it required little training and could be used to effect en mass without the requirement for the same degree of fire discipline and organization. These characteristics would later mark the emergence of early firearms, also viewed with suspicion because of their "leveling effect" across stratified late medievil and early renissance society.
