The King: Agincourt

Tags

Agincourt, Medieval Europe, Medieval France, Military Stuff, Movies I Hate, The King, Timothée Chalamont

One of the reasons I stopped posting during Covid was I got busy right in the middle of a two-part review of The King (2019, dir. David Michôd), a movie I rather disliked. I did the initial review, but I knew I needed to post a review of its battle scene, but after a couple months had passed, I couldn’t recall the scene clearly enough to review it from memory and the prospect of watching it again discouraged me from doing it; the Covid stress was bad enough without compounding it with a crappy movie. But I finally had the right combination of time and mental health to make myself rewatch it. And hey! It’s exactly as crappy as I remembered it being!

If it’s so crappy, why did I feel I needed to review it? Well, it’s about the battle of Agincourt, which has the distinction new of being one of the very few medieval battles to be depicted in film three times. Off the top of my head, I can’t think of another medieval battle depicted on screen three times, but I’m betting there have been at least three treatments of the battle of Hastings or the battle of Hattin that I haven’t seen. And that just seems to merit a post.

The Historical Agincourt

Since I’ve already discussed this battle in detail, I’ll just let you read it here if you need to. But I’ll summarize. In 1415, Henry V launched an invasion of northern France. After capturing Harfleur, he marked east, encountering a good deal of rain, and his men began to get sick, so he aimed for Calais with the intention of returning to England. But the French, knowing his army was weak, chased him down at Agincourt.

Knowing that he was seriously outnumbered and his men were weak, Henry adopted a very defensive position between two woods, organizing his men into a line in which his men-at-arms (cavalry dismounted to fight on foot) were either flanked by or interspersed with his longbow men. After some initial exchange of arrows (which the French probably were on the losing end of), the French cavalry charged but got repulsed by arrow fire. The French infantry advanced, but took high casualties because of the longbows. They lost formation and got slowed down by the muddy field, the retreating casualties, and the mounting bodies. The nature of the field channeled the French into an increasingly tight zone where they were unable to fight effectively against the English infantry. The English victory was sealed when the longbow men put away their bows and joined the attack using knives and hatchets.

A 15th-century depiction of Agincourt (inaccurately showing both sides using longbows)

The result was one of the most lopsided victories in medieval history. The French suffered something between 4 and 10,000 casualties, while the English suffered only about 110 casualties.

The King‘s take on Agincourt

In the film, Henry (Timothee Chalamet) is advised by one of his nobles to not confront the French because the English forces are sick and outnumbered. But Falstaff (Joel Edgerton) proposes a bold plan. The field at Agincourt will be very muddy once it rains overnight (which he knows it will because his bad knee always aches before rain) and the mud will neutralize the French advantage of numbers. So he suggests that instead of fighting on horseback, the English should dismount and fight on foot (a plan so novel the English have actually been doing exactly that for several generations). But the French won’t just advance onto the field on their own, so he suggests that a small force of men be advanced to draw the French into attacking them. Then, when the mud fouls their charge, the rest of the English forces, which have been hidden in the forests on either side of the field, will charge in at their flanks.

Chalamet as Henry V

Henry agrees to this gamble and, as predicted, it rains overnight. Because the men who are first advanced will essentially be making a suicide maneuver, Falstaff declares his intention to lead them, which Henry dislikes, but Falstaff persuades him that it’s the best option, and makes Henry promise not to make the follow-up attack until the French troops are fully committed. Henry meets with the Dauphin (Robert Pattinson) and offers to fight in single combat rather than a full pitched battle, obviously trying to keep Falstaff alive. The Dauphin rather strangely suggests this means Henry is a coward and as a result the battle goes ahead.

And it plays out roughly as Falstaff had planned. Falstaff leads a force on foot into the muddy field. The French make a very slow charge on horseback, not using lances but swords, and the English arrow-fire forces them to speed up. They slam into Falstaff’s unit, who, despite being substantially armed with pikes, make no effort to use the pikes to break the cavalry charge, even though that’s one of the main reasons to use pikes. As predicted, the mud bogs everyone down and the fight completely loses its organization (because cinematic soldiers can’t ever keep their ranks tight).

The English advancing onto the field

The French advance their reserves into the fight and the Dauphin gets into the battle as well. The English continue firing their arrows, mostly at the advancing cavalry, and then Henry launches his flanking maneuver. Then there is a long battle montage that focuses a lot on how muddy and vicious the fighting is.

Then the Dauphin shows up and offers Henry single combat. Even though the Dauphin is fresh to the fight and Henry is exhausted, Henry accepts, but the Dauphin embarrasses himself by slipping in the mud so much Henry just lets his men swarm the Dauphin. Logically the thing to do would be to either let his men kill the French prince or take him captive, but it’s unclear what finally becomes of the prince. Henry finds Falstaff dead and has a brief cry, and then walks off the field as men kneel before him. He’s asked what to do with the captives and orders them killed, a detail that is historically accurate, except that Henry made the decision during the battle, not after it; it’s also in Shakespeare, but almost always cut because it makes Henry look bad).

Robert Pattinson as some strung-out French hippie

The first thing to note is that this bears only a casual resemblance to the historical Battle of Agincourt. The French did indeed make a charge into a muddy field and get bogged down and they did indeed lose the battle. Henry did fight in the battle. Beyond that, however, it’s mostly fantasy. Falstaff wasn’t a real person and therefore couldn’t lead anyone into battle, and the English did not advance their forces first; the French changed and got bogged down and then eventually the English advanced. The French forces seem to be entirely cavalry; there’s no crossbowmen and while there are some infantry, they don’t seem to fight. The Dauphin was not present at the battle and Henry never made any offer to fight a single combat. There was no English flanking maneuver, unless you count the longbow men getting involved after they couldn’t continue arrow fire because the English troops were in the melee.

Additionally, this version of Agincourt is rather improbable for a couple reasons. First, if the English had advanced a force on foot, the French would probably have done the logical thing and used crossbows to cut them down, rather than charging into battle. So this battle requires the French to be too impatient to do the obvious thing. A second problem is that in order to flank the battlefield, Henry would have to get his men fairly close to the French position without being spotted, which requires the French to have not sent out any scouts into the forests to watch for such maneuvers. That’s a pretty basic mistake, again not impossible, but unlikely. Falstaff’s proposal is basically a suicide mission, and that sort of thing seems to have been generally uncommon in medieval warfare. So while the King‘s version of Agincourt is a battle that could have happened in the 15th century, it’s a pretty unlikely one, since it requires the French to be fairly stupid about one of the things they were famous for.

The French charging onto the field

How does it compare to the other two screen version of Agincourt?

The King‘s Agincourt bears virtually no resemblance to Olivier’s 1944 version. Olivier’s version very heavily emphasizes the French cavalry charge, turning the charge into a truly great moment of cinema in which the pace of the music beautifully mirrors the pace of the charge. The emphasis is on the gallantry of the charge and the actual fighting is reduced to a crowd of knights milling around in a mass and some English archers leaping out of trees onto cavalry that is inexplicably riding through the woods.

Michôd’s scene draws more heavily off on Branagh’s 1988 version. The field is muddy, and the extended melee scene has the same tone, with lots of slow footage of men fighting brutally, punching each other, falling in the mud, and so on. Both convey a very strong “war is hell” feeling, and neither tries to glorify the fighting at all, in contrast to Olivier’s version which was filmed at the end of World War II and made for audiences who already understood how horrible war could be and therefore wanted to see something glorious and uplifting. While Michôd certainly isn’t copying Branagh, I think Branagh’s influence is still there. Frankly, Branagh’s version is far superior, both in terms of its plausibility and as cinema; the music hauntingly underscores the mayhem in a way that still affects me when I think of the film. It’s a far more emotional scene, in part because Branagh took the time to develop the secondary characters enough that we care when we see them die, whereas The King is almost entirely focused first on Falstaff and then on Henry. (Michôd also admits that he ripped off a scene from Game of Thrones, supposedly unintentionally.)

So if I had to rank the three scenes in terms of accuracy, it would be Branagh on top, Michôd second, and Olivier third. Michôd’s battle does at least make sense even if it’s improbable, whereas Olivier’s just looks silly today ((but, in fairness to Olivier, stunt work was a much less developed and most of his extras were amateurs hired because they owned a horse). Ranked in terms of cinema, it would be Branagh, Olivier, then Michôd.

Overall, Michôd’s film is, in my opinion, just a fairly all-around miss. There is nothing I like about it at all, and I disliked watching it enough that it made me put this blog on hiatus for 18 months (well, ok, Covid was a factor too, but still…). For me, the battle is actually the highpoint of The King, and that’s saying something. If you want to see the story of Henry V well-told, rent Branagh’s brilliant film and savor its wonderful cast, masterful interpretation of the play, and Shakespeare’s glorious language.

Want to Know More?

Henry V has been the subject of a lot of popular biographies. One of my rules is that I won’t read historical works by journalists or ‘popular’ historians like Desmond Seward or Alison Weir because they tend to really irritate me with their superficial readings of the documents and facts. I haven’t seen a bio of Henry that I thought was really excellent yet, but John Matusiak’s Henry V (Routledge Historical Biographies)is fairly solid.

There are a variety of books on the battle of Agincourt, some of rather dubious value. It’s such a famous battle that it attracts a lot of writing by military enthusiasts, who are often former soldiers who think that because they know what modern warfare is like, they automatically can generalize to medieval warfare. Probably the best recent book is Anne Curry’s Agincourt: A New History. Curry is arguably the world’s expert on Agincourt and she makes good use of administrative records as well as the traditional narratives of the battle.

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Kenau: Women to the Rescue!

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16th century Europe, 16th Century Netherlands, Haarlem, Kenau Hasselaer, Military Stuff, Monic Hendrickx

Kenau (aka 1572: The Battle for Haarlem, 2014, dir. Maarten Treurniet, Dutch with English subtitles) is a Dutch/Belgian/Hungarian film about the Siege of Haarlem in the Netherlands in 1572 to 1573. The film focuses on the legend of Kenau Hasselaer, a folk hero who helped supposedly helped defend the Dutch city against the Spanish during the early phase of the Eighty Years’ War.

 

The Eighty Years’ War

By the 1550s, the territory we now think of as the Netherlands was part of the sprawling and unwieldy Hapsburg Empire that ruled Spain, the Holy Roman Empire, and the Low Countries, but lacked a clear unifying identity. Philip II of Spain was a devout Catholic who was opposed the Protestant Calvinism that was spreading in the Netherlands and sought to crack down on religious dissent, which took the form of an outbreak of iconoclasm, in which Calvinists smashed the statues of Catholic saints. Philip sent in the Duke of Alva, whose aggressive cracked down, combined with the imposition of taxes to help fund Philip’s war against the Ottoman Empire, triggered a rebelliom by the Calvinists, led by William the Silent, the Prince of Orange.

Alva sent his son, Don Fadrique, into Guelderland and Holland with an army of about 30,000 men to pacify the region. Fadrique sacked Zutphen and massacred the population of Naarden. That alienated the residents of Haarlem, who had mostly managed to avoid the religious tensions of the time and had intended to stay loyal to Philip. The town government sent four representatives to Amsterdam to negotiate with Fadrique, but in their absence, Wigbolt Ripperda, the Calvinist governor of Haarlem, deposed the town government and replaced them with Orangists. When the representatives returned from Haarlem, he arrested them. The local cathedral, dedicated to St Bavo, was stripped of its Catholic symbols the same day, an effective gesture of revolt against Philip.

Haarlem is due west of Amsterdam

A few days later, on December 11^th, Don Fadrique’s forces laid siege to the city. He had every reason to expect a fairly quick siege. Haarlem was not a large city and only had a garrison of about 4,000 men, many of whom were mercenaries. The city was walled, but its walls were in poor condition. But it was impossible to completely surround the city because it was built on a large lake, the Haarlemmermeer, which meant that the defenders were able to supplies into the city.

The city managed to repulse an initial assault, and the result was a prolonged and brutal siege. The Spanish attempted to undermine the walls, but the Haarlemers managed to dig their own counter-tunnels and collapsed the Spanish ones. The Spanish cannons blew down large sections of the walls, including two gates, the Kruispoort and the Janspoort, but the defenders managed to fill in the gaps with earth and rock. When the Spanish attacked the city, the defenders threw ‘tar-wreaths’, rings of flammable material soaked in burning tar, onto them.

In March, after 5 months, an army from Amsterdam was able to occupy the Haarlemmersmeer and complete the encirclement of the city, making it impossible to get more food into the city. The Spanish were able to launch a small fleet on the lake. By May, the food situation had become so desperate that the Haarlemers executed all the Spanish prisoners they had taken. Early in July, William the Silent tried to break the siege by sending an army of 5,000 to Haarlem, but Fadrique’s forces crushed the army.

St Bavo’s Church

At that point, with Haarlem virtually out of food, Ripperda’s government admitted the inevitable and negotiated a surrender. Fadrique permitted the town to buy the city’s freedom from sacking with an enormous ransom. But most of the garrison, along with 40 of the leading citizens were tied up and drowned in the river. Ripperda was beheaded. The occupying army violated the terms of the surrender by looting the town anyway.

Although the Spanish ultimately won the siege of Haarlem, it had a profound effect on the war. It bought William the Silent the time to shore up the defenses of Alkmaar further to the north, and the Dutch were profoundly inspired by the resistance the Haarlemers were putting up. When Fadrique tried to lay siege to Alkmaar, it repulsed a Spanish assault and then opened the dikes around the city, forcing the Spanish to completely withdraw. Unable to push further north, Fadrique and his father Alva were essentially thwarted and not long after that Philip II recalled Alva. As a result, the northern provinces of the Netherlands were able to effectively achieve independence, although the war lasted for another 7 decades before the Spanish threw in the towel.

 

Kenau Hasselaer

Kenau SImonsdochter Hasselaer (1526-1588) was the daughter of a brewer who married a shipbuilder named Nanning Borst, with whom she had four children: Guerte, Margiet, Lubbrich, and Gerbrand. After Nanning’s death around 1562, she continued running his business and made a couple logical expansions; she was importating wood from Norway to build ships, so she began dealing in timber as well and she expanded into Baltic commerce, selling Dutch grain into the region. Several of her brothers were shipbuilders as well, while her sister married a noted scholar.

A later essentially fantasy portrait of Kenau

During the siege, the women of Haarlem participated vigorously in the town’s defense, helping the haul earth and rebuild the damaged walls. This sort of thing was extremely common during sieged, since women as well as men stood to die (or be raped) if a town failed to keep out attackers. A single account of the siege, published only a few months after the siege, mentions Kenau as being tireless and fearless in her efforts to haul earth and keep the walls repaired. This probably also involved contributing wood to fortify the walls and gates; as late as 1585, she was fighting to get the town to repay her for wood she had sold them during the siege, and at least part of what she was owed didn’t get repaid until after her death.

Over time, however, Kenau became an object of many legends. Although all we know about her role in the siege is that she worked to maintain the fortifications, in popular stories, she was the one throwing the tar-wreaths onto the Spanish attackers. In the 1673 and 1773 centenary celebrations, she was described as fighting on the walls. By 1873, her role had grown to leading a troop of 300 women. Her name became a synonym for bravery, although it eventually evolved into a word for a shrewish woman. In 1800, a warship was named for her. She became a favorite subject for patriotic Dutch painters and engravers, and numerous images of her survive, none of which are likely to be an actual likeness of her.

A 1954 Romantic patriotic painting of Kenau leading the fighting

But by the 1872 anniversary, a Haarlem historian was starting to puncture her legend. He pointed out the sources from the time do not mention many female fatalities, which is unlikely if the women were actively fighting on the walls. He also argued that if other women had been fighting so hard, it was likely that there would be more than one refence to a specific woman helping defend the town. Although the Spanish executed 2000 male defenders of the town, they do not seem to have executed any women. It’s also been pointed out that during her efforts to get repaid for the timber, she never claims to have fought, although she does say in one court document “as a good patriot, I have sustained this town against the enemy.” If she was such a great war hero, the town was reluctant to admit it after the fact, and in fact many people in town called her a “witch” in the course of legal disputes with her. After her death, her son admitted that both Kenau and his sisters were “dangerous company for all men.”

After the siege, she left the city, managed to get herself appointed as the Weighing House Master in Arnemuiden. This was an important position, one not generally given to women. This seems to have been imposed on the town by William the Silent, suggesting that he appreciated whatever efforts or sacrifices she had made during the siege. In 1588, the captain of her trading ship was taken hostage in Norway. She set sail to get him released and was never seen again, although her son eventually discovered her ship for sail in another town, suggesting that she was captured by pirates and killed, a sad end for such a formidable woman.

 

Kenau in Kenau

The movie tells the story of the siege of Haarlem mostly through focusing on Kenau (Monic Hendrickx). The film jettisons a lot of what we know about her family. Her husband, incorrectly named Ysbrand, is already dead and she has only two daughters, Gertrude (Lisa Smit) and Kathelijne (Sallie Harmsen). She is correctly presented as a shipbuilder and sells some wood to the town when Wigbold Ripparta (Barry Atsma) presses her for it. She quarrels with a wealthy townsman Duyff (Jaap Spijkers), who is dissatisfied with the work she’s doing on a ship for him, and when his arrogance causes an accident that knocks one of her men into the canal, she leaps in and rescues him. She wears a man’s doublet and shirt throughout the film, the clearly the film wants us to view her as a ‘strong woman’. She wants nothing to do with the rebellion that his broken out elsewhere. She forbids Gertrude to embrace Calvinism, saying that she can do whatever she likes after the rebellion has ended.

Atsma as Wigbold and Hendrickx as Kenau

But Calvinists are agitating in Haarlem, and Wigbold’s son persuades Gertrude to go along with a small group of radicals when they break into St Bavo’s and small all the Catholic statuary. They get busted and are hauled off to Utrecht the very next day, Gertrude included, where the bishop immediately sentences them all to burn as heretics. By the time Kenau arrives, Gertrude is already tied to the stake. Kenau pleads with the priest, insisting that her daughter is a good Catholic, but when the pyre is lit, Kathelijne grabs a pistol and shoots Gertrude to spare her the suffering.

That’s all fairly improbable. The iconoclasm at Haarlem only happened after WIgbold seized power, so the film has to reverse the order of facts in order to give Kenau a motive to support the revolt. Haarlem had its own bishop, so the iconoclasts probably wouldn’t have been sent to Utrecht and would have been tried in Haarlerm. And there would certainly have been a delay of at least several days to allow for an actual trial. Having vaguely established religion as a motive for the rebellion and giving Kenau a motive to rebel, the movie promptly forgets religion entirely for the rest of the film.

During the initial Spanish assault, Kenau finds herself near the ramparts and, recognizing that hostile troops were in danger of scaling the walls, she organizes the women into a rock-hauling brigade so that the men on the ramparts have something to throw at the men on the ladders. Such things were entirely typical of the way women participated in defense of towns during sieges, and while it’s not there’s no evidence that Kenau actually did this, it’s not at all implausible.

But as the film goes on, the film comes up with increasingly unlikely ways for her to fight the Spanish. She stumbles onto some information that suggests that the Spanish will attack the Janspoort, but Wigbold is convinced the attack will come at the Kruispoort and refuses to allocate men to depend the Janspoort. So Kenau organized a group of women to defend the gate by building a second wall inside the gate. When the Spanish troops breach the gate, they find themselves trapped inside the second wall, where the women start pouring tar down on them and then thrown down a barrel of gunpowder and light it with a fire arrow, causing an enormous explosion that kills the invaders (but somehow doesn’t breach the wooden second wall).

The Spaniards about to get blown up

Then the food starts running out and Wigbold insists that the Spanish food convey from Amsterdam is too heavily protected to attack. Kenau organizes her Amazon commandos to attack the convey as it crosses the frozen Haarlemmermeer. They light fires to blind the convey and then attack the convey on skates, killing most of the troops and getting the food to the city. They manage to plant a spy in Don Fadrique’s (Attila Arpa) tent and she reports that the Spanish have undermined the gate and are planning to set off explosive charges to open a permanent breach in the walls. The Amazon commandos distract the Spanish troops by standing naked on the walls of Haarlem, which allows Kenau to get into the gunpowder store long enough to blow it up.

Unfortunately, she doesn’t get the gunpowder in the tunnel, so Faderique is still able to blow up the gate and the Spanish surge in to loot the town. Kenau uses Duyff’s ship to get an engineer (heretofore unseen) out of the town to Alkmaar but stays behind to find Kathelijne, and as a result she’s captured. She gets tied up and thrown into the canal, but because she knows how to swim she apparently gets away. The film ends by framing the heroic resistance of Haarlem as the reason for Dutch independence.

I’m of two minds about Kenau. On the one hand, the film generally distorts the facts. It attributes a whole lot of heroism to her and the other women of Haarlem that there is no evidence for. While the women of Haarlem certainly made an important contribution to the siege, there’s no reason to think that the women single-handedly saved the town over even actually fought at all, which is the impression the film offers. While Kenau’s various feats do bare a vague relationship to the facts (there was a Spanish plan to blow up the walls, getting food into the city was a serious problem, the defenders probably did pour tar or oil down onto the attackers, Kenau did survive the siege), none of those things happened the way the film shows.

Kenau about the blow up the gunpowder store

On the other hand, it’s pretty refreshing to see a war film in which women are the focus of the story, and the film generally explores women’s experiences during wartime much more than men’s. Except for the first fight scene, the male defenders generally take a back seat, doing their fighting in the background while Kenau’s Amazon commandos deal with a variety of problems the men are too beleaguered to address themselves. The film aces the Bechdel Test, and even when Kenau is talking about men with one of her daughters, the emphasis is generally on the relationship between the women.

The film has an interesting sub-plot looking at the fraught relationship Kenau has with Kathelijne. She is angry at Katheljlne for shooting Gertrude, doesn’t want her to risk her life fighting on the front lines, and doesn’t want Kathelijne to hook up with a particular mercenary. But the script makes it clear that their conflict is driven by deeper issues. While the performances in the film are generally mediocre, Hendrickx truly shines as the ferociously strong-willing Kenau and despite the enormous differences, her Kenau reminds me of no one so much as Holly Hunter’s Ada McGrath in The Piano. Both women are so strong-willed they don’t entirely understand their own motives but cannot be other than who they are.

Is Kenau a brilliant film? No. But I’ve seen far worse war movies and the solidly feminist angle makes it a war movie I’ve never seen before.

 

Want to Know More?

Kenau is available on Amazon under the title 1572: The Battle for Haarlem. 

There aren’t, so far as I know, any books about Kenau. If you’re interested in the 80 Years’ War, check out Revolt in the Netherlands: The Eighty Years’ War, 1568-1648.

Babylon Berlin: The Black Reichswehr

Tags

20th Century Europe, 20th Century Germany, Babylon Berlin, Black Reichswehr, Erich Ludendorff, Fritz Thyssen, Military Stuff, Weimar Republic

One of the major plots in the second season of Babylon Berlin is a plot to overthrow the Weimar Republic and return Kaiser Wilhelm II to power. It revolves around a coterie of military and former military officers who are working with a wealthy industrialist to build a covert air force in the Soviet Union. Is there any basis for any of this?

Yes, quite a bit.

 

The Shadow of the Great War

The German military in the 1920s struggled to make peace with its defeat in the Great War. Many of the officers had far more loyalty to their old emperor than they did to the new democratic government. Convinced that the German military was the best in the world (which arguably it was at the start of the war), it was far easier to place the blame for Germany’s defeat on the civilian population than on its own mistakes, Kaiser Wilhilm’s ineptitude, and on the simple fact that by the end of the war it was fighting all the other major industrialized powers almost single-handedly. When defeat became inevitable, the military sought to protect Wilhelm II from the humiliation of defeat by persuading him to abdicate. That way the new Weimar Republic would have to shoulder the burden of surrender. Having thus engineered the surrender of the new government, the military then turned around and blamed the government for surrendering.

The surrender wasn’t just humiliating. It was also shocking. Like all the belligerent nations, the German government had aggressively controlled its press and propagandized the population into believing that the war was someone else’s fault but that nevertheless Germany was just about to win the war. Defeat was not considered possible, so when it came, the population was shocked and confused. If we were winning just a few months ago, why did we surrender?

These forces gave rise to the idea of the Dolchstoß, the ‘Stab in the Back’ theory. This idea maintained that Germany had been defeated from within, that someone somewhere inside the government had betrayed Germany and engineered the defeat of the military. This idea was appealing because it explained Germany’s military failure in a way that freed the military from any blame for what had happened.It created a sense of victimization that festered in German culture throughout the 20s and 30s, especially after the terrifying hyperinflation of 1923. Ultimately, Hitler blamed the Dolchstoß on the Jews, drawing imaginary lines between actual Jews in the Weimar government and a fictitious ‘International Jewish Conspiracy’ that supposedly encompassed bankers, industrialists, politicians, and communists, among others.

To make things a little bit worse, when the Spartacist League staged an uprising in Berlin, the young government turned to the military to suppress it and continued doing so later in the decade, thus legitimizing the idea that the military had a role to play in civilian political affairs. Just a few years later, both the Kapp Putsch and the Beer Hall Putsch included military elements, demonstrating that there was a taste for anti-democratic politics within the German military. The civilian government abandoned all efforts to reconcile the military with the new democratic principles that were supposedly guiding Germany.

A crowd during the Kapp Putsch

Adding to the military’s resentment was the Treaty of Versailles. In addition to staggering reparations payments to France and Britain that undermined the Germany economy, the Treaty also sought to eliminate the possibility of a future German threat to France and Britain by imposing strict limits on the German military. The German military was allowed to have a total of 100,000 soldiers (three units of cavalry and seven of infantry), with no more than 4,000 officers. The navy could have no more than 15,000 men, six battleships, six cruisers, six destroyers, and 12 torpedo boats. Civilians were not to receive military training and the manufacture and import of weapons and poison gas were prohibited. For a nation that had prided itself on the power of its military, these requirements were deeply unpopular. So it’s no surprise that the military made regular efforts to evade them.

 

The Black Reichswehr

In 1921, General Hans von Seeckt established the illicit Sondergruppe R, a secret group of military leaders who were tasked with evading the Treaty of Versailles’ limits. Sondergruppe R quickly reached an agreement with the Soviets in which the Germans would provide the Soviets with technology and training for the Soviet arms industry in exchange for Soviet assistance in evading the enforcement of the Treaty. The Sondergruppe established a series of shell corporations known as the GEFU, whose purpose was to funnel German funds into the Soviet Union for the creation of tanks, aircraft, poison gas, and other contraband weapons.

One example of this was the creation of the Lipetsk Air Base in the Soviet Union. In this arrangement, the Germans trained Soviet pilots in exchange for the Soviets allowing the construction of a secret air force. In the show, Inspector Rath (Volker Bruch) is sent in an airplane to get evidence of this illegal arrangement by flying over Lipetsk so that photographs can be taken. Although Rath’s efforts to expose this fall apart by the end of the season, the existence of the Lipetsk airbase was eventually exposed in 1931 in an article in the Weltbühne, the same newspaper that Samuel Katelbach (Karl Markvocics) edits in the series.

 

Sondergruppe R almost immediately began creating illegal paramilitary units, known as the Black Reichswehr. These were civilian recruits of nearly 20,000 who received illegal military training based in Küstrin in what is today western Poland. Because they did not officially exist, the German government could deny all knowledge of them while using them for its own ends. Between 1923 and 1925 France occupied the Ruhr Valley, one of Germany’s industrial centers, to enforce reparations payments in the form of coal and timber. The Occupation of the Ruhr was understandably unpopular in Germany, the Black Reichswehr engaged in sabotage efforts against the French. The Black Reichswehr were also used to commit a series of Feme Murders, a form of vigilante justice directed against those accused of helping enforce the Treaty’s provisions in which vigilante courts would convict someone in absentia and then sentence them to death by assassination. An effort by the Weimar government to enforce the Occupation triggered the Küstrin Putsch, in which the local Black Reichswehr tried to seize control of the city. The Putsch was thwarted by the regular army and the Küstrin paramilitary was disbanded.

But there were numerous other Freikorps groups that fall under the general banner of the Black Reichswehr. These groups appealed to veterans who were worried about the direction the country was moving in, who were hostile to Socialism, or who resented the treatment of the army after the war. The Black Reichswehr also developed ties to numerous more legitimate groups. For example, the Stahlhelm (Steel Helmet) was a veterans organization numbering around 500,000 that helped veterans find jobs and housing. After 1929 it became active in anti-Republican politics. Initially it was a rival to the Nazi Party for leadership of the nationalists in Germany, but in 1933, the Nazi Sturmabteilung (itself the Nazi Freikorps) raided the Stahlhelm’s organization and eventually forced it to merge with the SA and dissolve itself.

In the show, the industrialist Alfred Nyssen (Lars Eidinger) is actively working with Major General Kurt Seegers (Ernst Stötzner) to fund these efforts and import a train-load of phosgene gas from the Soviet Union to help the coup that is being planned. Neither character is a real person, but Nyssen is clearly modeled on Fritz Thyssen, an anti-communist industrialist who increasingly supported and funded Hitler’s efforts, including dismissing all of his Jewish employees, until he broke with Hitler in 1938 and fled the country. Seegers seems loosely based on nationalist general Erich Ludendorff, who led the German army in the second half the Great War. He was active in anti-Republican efforts throughout the 1920s. He participated in both the Kapp and Beer Hall Putsches, and was a vocal proponent of the Dolchstoß theory. He supported Hitler and ran as the Nazi Party candidate for president in 1925, with little success. He eventually broke with Hitler as well.

Ernst Stötzner as Kurt Seegers

 

This review was made possible by a generous donation from one of my loyal readers. Peter, I hope you feel you got your money’s worth! If you would like me to review a specific film or series, please make a generous donation to my PayPal account and let me know what you would like me to review. If I can get access to it and think it’s appropriate for this blog, I’ll be glad to review it.

 

Want to Know More? 

Babylon Berlin is available on Amazon if you want to own it, and by streaming on Netflix. The novels by Volker Kutscher are also available: Babylon Berlin, The Silent Death, and Goldstein.

If you’re interested in the Weimar Republic, a good place to start would be with Eric D. Weitz’ Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy.

The Last Kingdom: Testudos!

Tags

Alexander Draymon, BBC, Bernard Cornwell, Medieval England, Medieval Europe, Military Stuff, The Last Kingdom, Uhtred of Bebbanburg, Vikings

I’ve finally found time to do my last post on The Last Kingdom, after wading through weeks’ worth of term papers and exams. Sorry this post is overdue. I knew I was going to have to re-watch several episodes to formulate my thoughts on the show’s depiction of 9^th century warfare, and it took me a while to find the time.

In the series, the Vikings and the Anglo-Saxons are equipped nearly identically in terms of their war gear, with one major exception. Vikings get round shields and Anglo-Saxons get rather pathetic small rectangular shields, clearly inferior in terms of how much of their body they cover and also in terms of manufacture (the Viking shields have metal rims, or actually if you look close, painted details designed to look like metal rims). The purpose of this difference is probably so that the viewer can distinguish the Viking troops from the Anglo-Saxons, which is a reasonable issue for the show to struggle with. But it’s wrong historically. Both Vikings and Anglo-Saxons had the same type of shields. Visually, there wouldn’t have been a whole lot to distinguish the two sides from each other.

In the first episode, three Northumbrian eldermen lead their troops against the invading Vikings. At the battlefield, the Vikings form a testudo and wait in position while the Anglo-Saxons charge across the field in an unruly mob, having apparently never seen a testudo before. (For those who are unclear on what a testudo is, I discuss the topic here.) The Anglo-Saxons are unable to penetrate the testudo, although they do force the Vikings to give a little ground and manage to kill a few. This leads to the Anglo-Saxon reinforcements charging in, thinking they are winning.

The foolish Anglo-Saxons charging the Viking testudo

But then a second Viking unit rushes the field and forms a second testudo behind the Anglo-Saxons. This effective pens the Anglo-Saxons in. The two testudos slowly advance, mercilessly crushing the Northumbrian troops like the garbage compactor scene in Star Wars, only with much bloodier results.

There are a few things wrong here, namely almost everything. First, there is zero evidence that the Norse understood the concept of the testudo, much less had the intensive group military training to pull the formation off. (That is, unless you consider The Vikings, season 1, evidence.) Testudos required a degree of unit cohesion and training that, so far as the evidence allows us to speak, neither the Norse nor the Anglo-Saxons possessed. There’s no reason to think either side would have known about this ancient Roman military technique, much less been able to execute it.

(Ok, a brief digression. There is actually one medieval source that describes Vikings using a testudo. Abbo of Saint-Germaine, a French monk who was present at the Viking Siege of Paris in 886, describes the Vikings as advancing in a testudo. However, in this passage he’s using Roman military terminology, certainly because he’s read some Roman authors and possibly because he wants to show off how well-read he is. The question that historians debate is whether or not Abbo actually understands what a testudo is. Many scholars think that he is using Roman technical vocabulary without really knowing what the vocubalary means. In other words, he’s seen the Vikings using a shield wall and has decided to call that shield wall a testudo, either because he thinks it will make him look more learned or because he thinks that a medieval shield wall is the same thing as a testudo. This is a common problem with medieval authors, not at all unique to Abbo.

And I agree. I think it is much more likely that Abbo is misusing the term testudo here than that the Vikings somehow knew what an ancient Roman military formation involved, because there’s no easy way to explain how the Norse would have had access to military ideas from a culture that died out several centuries before their time. The Norse never fought a classical Roman legion, did not speak Latin, and did not know how to read. So how would they have gotten this information? Occam’s Razor makes me think that Abbo is more likely to have misused the terminology than that the Norse are to have understood this technique. However, this well-educated amateur scholar disagrees with my assessment. So you can decide for yourself.)

Second, the testudo was not really a fighting formation. Its tactical purpose was to allow soldiers to maneuver on the battlefield while taking arrow fire. It essentially puts soldiers into a sort of defensive crouch with their shields locked together. It’s unlikely that soldiers could have fought effectively from that posture, and even more unlikely that they could have held that formation effectively when a large number of hostile soldiers were charging them and slamming into the shields. The idea that a testudo could function offensively to push men back and kill them while still functioning defensively is highly dubious.

Anglo-Saxons with their crappy little shields.

Third, if you watch carefully, you see two testudos slowly closing together, trapping the Anglo-Saxons within. But there’s a huge problem. The testudo is a straight line. So when two testudos close in on each other, there’s nothing to prevent the Northumbrians trapped within from simply running out at the top or the bottom of the formation. The camera shot is structured to keep the viewer from realizing that is a possibility, but it definitely is.

In reality, the Vikings and the Anglo-Saxons used a very similar tactic when they had open-field battles. They both employed a formation called a shield wall, which is similar to a testudo but actually possible. In a shield wall, soldiers stand in a long line, close enough together that their shields overlap. The front rank focuses its energies on defense, while the men in the rank behind them focus on attacking over the shoulders of the front rank. Their presence also helps brace the front line, and if a man in the front rank is injured or killed, the man behind him can step up and close the gap.

The shield wall was a very effective formation, probably the most effective formation of the early Middle Ages. Unlike a testudo, it didn’t require long hours of practice to pull off (although certainly some drilling was necessary). At the battle of Hastings in 1066, the Anglo-Saxon shield wall withstood repeated charges by the Norman cavalry, although keeping the men from breaking rank and counter-attacking whenever the Normans retreated was a problem.

The big tactical drawback of the shield wall is that it was a static formation. When it advanced, it ran the risk of losing cohesion, and without cohesion, it lost most of its value. As a result, the Anglo-Saxons tended to take up a shield wall position and then wait for the other side to charge, trusting in the strength of their defensive position. As a result, when two Anglo-Saxon armies confronted each other, they frequently both adopted the shield wall formation and then waited for the other side to charge. They would taunt each other, each side hoping the other would lose its self-control and charge, thereby surrendering the defensive advantage.

A Roman testudo. Note that it requires fairly tall shields, the sort of shields no one in the MIddle Ages used

So the scene as it’s depicted is sort of the opposite of what would probably have happened if the Vikings had taken up a testudo. The Anglo-Saxons would have done the same and tried to goad the Norse into breaking formation. They were unlike to have charged recklessly and without any structure to attack an unfamiliar formation. We could always assume that the eldermen were stupid, because military commanders did sometimes make shitty decisions, act rashly or with overconfidence, or lose control of their troops. But a plot that requires stupidity to work is a lousy plot.

In the third episode, we see Uhtred (Alexander Draymon) and Leofric (Adrian Bower) drilling a group of Anglo-Saxon men in a shield wall technique. The two sides line up and adopt a shield wall (or what would pass for a shield wall with those crappy little rectangular shields). But then Leofric’s side charges, losing all cohesion, and Uhtred’s side responds by quickly losing cohesion as well. In the second round, the two sides advance more cautiously, probably more the way an actual shield wall would, at least until Leofric’s side charges again and dissolves into disorder. Given that it’s a training sequence, we can forgive that.

Then Uhtred teaches the Anglo-Saxons how to do a testudo, a totally new and unfamiliar formation they’ve never seen before. But Uhtred forgets to make himself part of the shield wall and instead stands in front of it when Leofric’s line charges. It’s a slightly comical moment, but it undercuts the idea that Uhtred is really a great tactician. But overall, this training scene is probably the closest the show gets to showing us something real about how Anglo-Saxons fought.

Uhtred in front of his testudo. Never mind the boom mike.

The idea that the Norse understood the testudo seems to only go back to first seasons of The Vikings. It’s a good illustration of how an historical film or show can shift the way people think about the past for the worse.

If you need help picturing this battle, the always-amusing Lindybeige has a nice analysis of the first episode.

 

The Battle of Edington

The first season climaxes with the Battle of Edington. The Danes, led by the villainous Skorpa (Jonas Malmsjö) and the less villainous Guthrum (Thomas W Gabrielsson) and the Anglo-Saxons, basically led by Leofric and Uhtred, take up positions opposite each other on a field. Both sides form a testudo, with the Anglo-Saxons suddenly having both their usual crappy rectangular shields and kite shields. The kite shield (which I always think of as the Ice-Cream-Cone shield because in silhouette they look like sugar cones with a single scoop of ice cream on them) seems to have been developed in the 11^th century for use from horseback (because the narrow end of the shield can fit between the horse’s neck and the rider’s leg). The 9^th century Anglo-Saxons didn’t use kite shields because 1) they hadn’t been invented yet, 2) the Anglo-Saxons were quite resistant to fighting from horseback, and 3) kite shields are rather awkwardly shaped for use by foot soldiers (although foot soldiers can use them). But the production people on the show must have realized that the crappy rectangular shields simply wouldn’t work for a testudo and just threw in some kite shields hoping no one would notice. But I did. That’s why I get paid the big bucks to review shows like this.

Although both sides possess small cavalry units, they’re mostly using foot soldiers. This will become important later on.

The Vikings decide to charge, despite the fact that charging a shield wall is generally a losing tactic. Despite inflicting some casualties (including Leofric), the Vikings are unable to penetrate the Anglo-Saxon testudo, which begins to force the Vikings backward.

The Vikings (left) collide with the Anglo-Saxons (right). The shields in the middle are the two testudos pressed against each other.

At this point, Skorpa has an opportunity to shift the course of the battle by leading his cavalry to flank the Anglo-Saxon formation which is vulnerable on its sides and read. Instead, he succumbs to his villainy and attacks the Anglo-Saxon camp, killing Uhtred’s current woman and bringing her head back to taunt him with.

That turns out to be a bad idea. The enraged Uhtred breaks from the testudo, leaps over the Viking testudo, and starts slaughtering Vikings, who are unable to do anything in response to his righteous fury (which apparently acts like a power-up in a video game). He single-handedly opens a big gap in the Viking position, allowing the Anglo-Saxons to charge into the breach and slaughter the bad guys, whose eyeliner is no longer able to protect them. Skorpa gets speared in the chest, Guthrum has to surrender and accept conversion, and the Anglo-Saxons get to live happily every after until next season, except poor Uhtred, who gets lots of juicy manpain to chew on because the woman he’s loved for the last two episodes has died.

Some elements of this are plausible. If you substitute shield walls for testudos, you have a basically believable 9^th century battle, at least until Uhtred eats his spinach and starts clobbering the Vikings. Skorpa’s actions are more cartoon bad guy than ruthless military leader, but I suppose we could say he decided that a flanking maneuver wouldn’t work because he didn’t have a large cavalry unit and his maneuver might have been countered by the Anglo-Saxon cavalry. It seems unlikely that the Anglo-Saxons wouldn’t have posted any guards at their camp in case of just such villainy, and it’s not clear why the Anglo-Saxon cavalry doesn’t move to stop the raid on the camp. But this battle definitely makes a hell of a lot more sense than the one that opens the series.

11th century Normans with kite shields

In general, I dislike the show’s treatment of warfare. The show imagines that the Viking were able to beat the Anglo-Saxons because they had a superior battlefield tactic that the Anglo-Saxons didn’t understand, until Uhtred spilled the beans about how to perform the testudo. That’s just untrue. The Vikings did have a tactical advantage, but it was their longships, not their land tactics. The longship allowed the Vikings to get into a coastal or riverine area quickly, attack a surprised community when its defenses were down, and then get away before the local noble could raise a force to respond. However, during the late 9^th century, the Norse switched over to conquest rather than raiding. At that point, the advantage that they had was more about numbers than superior tactics, from what we can tell from surviving sources. The Great Army (as the Viking force was called) probably included several thousand men (although historians have debated the exact size because we have no particularly solid numbers with which to make a real estimate). It wasn’t an enormous force, but the typical Anglo-Saxon kingdom probably could only field a force of several hundred fully trained elite warriors, supplementing that force with much more poorly-trained local peasant levies. So the Great Army probably had the upper hand in terms of numbers and battle experience. The force that Guthrum invaded Wessex with was only half the Great Army, but Alfred’s forces were weakened by years of coastal raiding and a few key defeats. Edington might only have involved one or two thousand men in total, but Alfred was gambling a lot on that battle.

The show also has a tendency, like so many modern depictions of ancient and medieval warfare, to privilege the righteousness of the hero’s cause over all other considerations. Uhtred wins his fights not because he is a demonstrably better fighter or because he’s tactically smarter, but because he’s filled with righteous fury that the enemy ultimately cannot prevail against. It’s the sort of assumption that teenagers make about how combat works. In general, Uhtred acts like an indignant teenager and the show tends to reward him for it. I want to like this show, because I love the fact that it’s telling a story about a period of English history that rarely gets much attention, but Uhtred is just such an unlikable and petulant protagonist that I can’t sympathize with him. Sigh.

This review was paid for by a kind donation to my Paypal account by my faithful reader Lyn. Thanks, Lyn! I’ve got a couple more requested reviews to tackle (my apologies that I’ve been taking a while to get to them guys) but if you want me to review a show or film, please make a generous donation and tell me what you want me to cover, and I’ll get to it as soon as I can.

Want to Know More?

The Last Kingdom is available on Amazon, as well as on Netflix. The first book of Bernard Cornwell’s Saxon Stories is also called The Last Kingdom.

If you want to know more about Anglo-Saxon warfare, I would suggest the works of Richard Abels. His Lordship and Military Obligation in Anglo-Saxon England is excellent. And his Alfred the Great: War, Kingship and Culture in Anglo-Saxon England is very topical for this series.

The White Queen: Richard III

Tags

Amanda Hale, Aneurin Bernard, BBC, Bosworth Field, Edward V, Elizabeth Woodville, Kings and Queens, Margaret Beaufort, Medieval England, Medieval Europe, Military Stuff, Richard III, The Princes in the Tower, The White Queen

The last three episodes of The White Queen deal with Richard III’s seizure of power after his brother Edward IV dies in 1483. This portion of the series definitely falls on the ‘Yet So Far’ side of this series, and I figured it deserved a post of its own.

The show’s take on Richard is an interesting one. Shakespeare and the Tudors in general depicted him as a scheming villain who would stop at nothing to get the crown. But this Richard (Aneurin Bernard) is a basically decent man, who remains loyal to his brother until late in Edward’s reign, when frustrations with some of Edward’s choices and growing tensions with the Woodvilles lead him into betraying his nephew Edward. His wife Anne (Faye Marsay) hates Queen Elizabeth (Rebecca Ferguson) and thinks she is a literal witch who caused the death of Anne’s sister Isabel, and she urges her husband to take action against the Woodvilles. And while Richard and Elizabeth sincerely try to find a way to trust each other, Margaret Beaufort (Amanda Hale) and her husband Lord Stanley (Rupert Graves) actively lie to both sides to encourage distrust between them so that Margaret’s son Henry Tudor (Michael Marcus) can take the throne. So this Richard is a decent man simply unable to find a way to make peace and must therefore do evil instead.

Bernard’s Richard in a very snappy outfit

The reality was somewhat more complex than that. The later 15^th century was a harsh period politically. Over the previous century and a half, two kings were usurped (Edward II and Richard II), there were two royal minorities (Richard II and Henry VI) and one disastrously incompetent king (Henry VI); all of that made the power of the crown more unstable than it had been in the 12^th or 13^th century. At the same time, the wars in France had made several noble families far richer than in previous centuries, closing the gap between the monarch and his most powerful subjects. Parliament did not yet have institutional structures to enable it to resist the pressure of aggressive kings and nobles, and the law courts easily succumbed to pressure from nobles to give highly biased rulings. All that meant that politics during the last decades of the Plantagenet dynasty were characterized by a certain dog-eat-dog ruthlessness. In the 1470s, George of Clarence and Richard (who had married sisters) were eager to get their hands on the fortune of their mother-in-law, the Dowager Countess of Warwick, so they prevailed upon Edward and Parliament to have the countess declared legally dead so their wives could inherit her estates, despite the unfortunate woman being very much alive and in evidence.

Richard did not get along well with the Woodvilles during his brother’s reign. Like many other nobles, he resented them grabbing up marriage partners and important offices, and the Woodvilles likewise disliked him, at least in part because by the end of the reign, he was next in line should anything happen to Edward’s children.

When Edward died unexpectedly, leaving behind his 11-year old son Edward as his heir, it necessitated the appointment of a regent to govern for him for several years. Richard became Lord Protector, a title invented for his father the duke of York during Henry VI’s mental incapacity. That automatically created tension between the Dowager Queen Elizabeth, who as mother of the king could be expected to have a great deal of influence with young Edward, and Richard, who as Lord Protector was now the most important official in the country. For Richard, this created a dilemma. He might be politically ascendant for the next few years, but Elizabeth’s influence over Edward meant that the young king would probably absorb his mother’s dislike for Richard. Eventually, Edward would be old enough to assume power, and at that point he was likely to be hostile to Richard.

So Richard was in a bad position. It was probably just a matter of time before the Woodvilles found a way to use the young king against Richard, perhaps stripping him of his offices and honors, and perhaps even finding an excuse to execute him. It was either do or be done to eventually, and Richard decided to do.

Richard III’s skeleton shows he really did have a deformed spine

Right after the old Edward’s death, Richard intercepted young Edward’s maternal uncle, Earl Rivers, who was escorting their nephew to London. He arrested Rivers and took charge of the young king, claiming that there was a plot to deprive Richard his role as Lord Protector. Whether there was any truth to his claim is unknown, but it’s not entirely implausible. He had installed Edward in the Tower of London. The Dowager Queen took all her remaining children and sought sanctuary in Westminster Abbey. But several days later, she agreed to release her youngest son Richard (Edward’s full brother) to the Lord Protector in order to participate in Edward’s coronation, which was supposed to happen on June 22^nd.

Robert Stillington, bishop of Bath and Wells (but not the baby-eating one), told Richard that he had performed a marriage ceremony for Edward to a different woman prior to his marriage to Elizabeth Woodville, which meant that his marriage to Elizabeth was bigamous and therefore invalid, which in turn meant that young Edward and Richard were illegitimate and the Lord Protector was therefore the rightful king. Whether Stillington had any evidence to support this claim or if he was just giving Richard cover for what he had decided to do is unknown; given Edward’s amorousness, the claim is certainly not impossible, but most historians feel Stillington was lying.

Regardless, this gave Richard the ammunition he needed. On the 22^nd, instead of a coronation, a sermon was preached outside Old St. Paul’s circulating Stllington’s claim and declaring the two boys bastards. On June 25^th, Earl Rivers was found guilty of treason and executed and the next day Richard publicly agreed to become king. He was crowned on July 6^th, completing the coup. After the summer of 1483, neither of the young princes were ever seen in public again.

 

The Princes in the Tower

What happened to Edward V and his younger brother Richard is unknown. It’s virtually certain they were murdered at some point (a pair of skeletons often thought to be them were discovered in a disused staircase of the Tower of London centuries later), but who actually killed them, we don’t know. Shakespeare and other Tudor authors put the blame on Richard, while people interested in defending Richard have offered a variety of other suspects. No serious scholar thinks that Richard personally stabbed or strangled them, but it is inconceivable that they were killed without Richard’s agreement; they were simply too important for some nobleman to sneak into the Tower and do them in without Richard’s knowledge.

The series takes an interesting approach to this question. It never resolves the issue. Someone enters the young king’s chamber in the Tower and he is startled awake, and that’s the last we see of him. For the remainder of the series, all the major characters wrestle with what happened to the boys. Elizabeth agonizes over the rumors that they are dead. Richard seems haunted by the question, and eventually goes to see Queen Elizabeth, asking her if her witchcraft stole them away, so it’s pretty clear that he didn’t do it. At different points both Margaret Beaufort and Anne Neville instruct underlings to kill the boys, so the viewer is left with the puzzle of whether one of the nobles or servants of Richard, Margaret, or Anne did the deed.

Queen Elizabeth and her daughter send a curse after whoever murdered the young king, and Anne eventually sickens and dies, so the show appears to point the finger at her. But she asks one of her lackeys if he did the deed and he denies it, absolving her of the guilt she is carrying. Margaret likewise wrestles with the issue of whether she can orchestrate the murder of Prince Richard, whom she literally brought into the world; her husband Lord Stanley (Rupert Graves) takes enormous pleasure at forcing her to say she wants the boy dead.

Bernard as Richard and Marsay as Anne

 

This approach has two virtues. First, it avoids passing judgment where historians have no definitive answer, and second, it dramatizes the widespread uncertainty felt at the time over what had happened to them. No one in 1485 knew the answer (except whoever did the deed), so the show leaves us hanging the way events left everyone at the time hanging.

However, ultimately, it’s a cop-out. As I noted, serious historians agree that Richard was responsible for their fate, even if he didn’t murder them with his own hands. The series is more than willing to show things that didn’t happen, such Edward, George, and Richard personally smothering Henry VI, or the Woodvilles conjuring hurricanes, so to suddenly demur at this point is just cheating. And Gregory is more than willing to give us her rather improbable take on a variety of issues, such as why Richard III was interested in his niece Elizabeth, so refusing to give us her solution to who done it feels cheap, like reading an Agatha Christie novel that ends with Poirot admitting he has no clue who the murderer is.

Furthermore, the series veers off wildly into La-La Land with this whole incident, because after Richard snatches young Edward, Queen Elizabeth manages to smuggle out her younger son Richard to Flanders under the name ‘Perkin Warbeck’, and somehow finds a lookalike boy to pretend to be him, so that King Richard mistakenly thinks he has Prince Richard in the Tower. This imposter somehow never gives the game away, nor does young Edward.

For those of you less familiar with the actual reign of Henry VII, one of the rebellions against him was in the name of a pretender named Perkin Warbeck. So Gregory is claiming that Perkin Warbeck actually was the man he claimed to be. It’s a cute twist, but utterly improbable.

 

The Battle of Bosworth Field

The show’s take on the battle that ended Richard III’s brief reign and life is pretty sad. The show clearly didn’t have a lot of money for battle scenes or even decent stuntmen or a good fight co-ordinator, because the two battles that are shown are both laughably bad. The most obvious problem is that the Battle of Bosworth Field takes place in a forest. The two sides have no formation, so as with so many other bad renditions of historical battles, the battle is depicted as a series of one-on-one fights with soldiers on both sides running in from both sides of the camera. There’s lots of sword-slapping-on-sword pseudo-fighting, and few of the men carry shields. There’s no sign of the cannons Richard used to harass Henry’s men as they maneuvered around a nearby marsh. There’s no cavalry, even though Richard’s charge straight at Henry’s position was one of the critical moments in the battle; had he succeeded he would have killed Henry and ended the battle right there, but instead he failed and wound up isolated and unhorsed, which led to his death. At least the men are wearing reasonable approximations of real period armor (although, as always, they go into battle mostly without helmets so the audience can see the actors’ faces).

Note the total absence of a field

I can totally appreciate that a miniseries doesn’t have the budget to realistically recreate a battle involving perhaps 15-20,000 men. Cavalry charges are expensive to stage. But it can’t have cost more to stage the fight in a field somewhere rather than a forest. It’s pretty clear they staged it in a forest because it made it easier to disguise the fact that they only had about 20 guys. Perhaps this might have worked for some other battle, but this particular battle is so famously set in a field, that’s its whole freaking name! Trying to dodge the issue here fails so badly it calls attention to how poorly the fight is staged. Given that it’s the climax of the whole series, it would have been nice if they had found another way to handle it.

Want to Know More?

The White Queen is available on Starz, and on Amazon. The three novels it is based on are The White Queen, The Red Queen, and The Kingmaker’s Daughter. They are also available as a set with two other novels.

The best book I know on Richard III is Charles Ross’ appropriately-named Richard III. Ross was, until his tragic murder during a break-in, probably the leading historian of Edward IV and Richard III and his take on these two men and their era has strongly influenced my approach to the series. I can’t recommend his books on them highly enough.

Empire: The Battle of Mutina

Tags

Ancient Rome, Battle of Mutina, Empire, Mark Antony, Military Stuff, Movies I Hate, Octavian/Augustus, Roman Republic, Santiago Cabrera, Vincent Regan

I hate Empire with a surprising passion. I want nothing better than to forget the 6 hours I spent watching it, but somehow I just can’t seem to stop writing about this turd, sort of the way I couldn’t stop picking at a wart that I once had on my right hand, even though picking at it hurt in a bad way. The worst thing ever filmed about ancient Rome culminates in the Battle of Mutina, a very odd choice, but no odder than the other shit that gets dropped into this film.

 

The Battle of Mutina

Historically, the Battle of Mutina was a fairly minor conflict, usually barely even mentioned in modern histories of the Late Republic. In 43 BC, the negotiations between the Senate and Mark Antony broke down. Antony insisted on being given a 5-year governorship in Gaul, the way Caesar had before him. Gaul was close enough that Antony could swoop down into Italy if he disliked what was happening in Rome. But the post had already been given to Decimus Junius Brutus, one of Caesar’s assassins. So Antony laid siege to Decimus in Mutina (modern Modena). The two consuls, Pansa and Hirtius, and Octavian all hurried north with forces to break the siege. Antony’s army ran into Pansa’s forces and routed them, mortally wounding Pansa in the process, but then retreated as Hirtius’ troops showed up.

The two sides clashed again somewhere outside Mutina. The battle doesn’t seem to be well-enough documented to enable a full reconstruction of it, but it went poorly for Antony. Hirtius’ forces were able to attack Antony’s camp, but Hirtius was killed in the assault. Octavian performed well in the battle; when the standard-bearer was killed, Octavian took it up and carried it for an extended period. After the battle, the Republic was now without consuls. Decimus tried to take control of the troops, but Octavian refused to surrender control over them. So Decimus tried to flee to Macedonia where Brutus and Cassius were gathering troops, but he was caught and executed. Mutina helped establish Octavian as a major leader, despite being only 19, and created the conditions that forced Antony to make common cause with him against the Liberators. But it wasn’t the end of the struggle between Antony and Octavian by a long shot, since Octavian only finally defeated Antony at Actium in 31 BC, 12 years later.

 

Empire’s Version of Mutina

I was saddened to discover that instead of shelling out a couple of bucks for the DVD of this wretched miniseries, I could have just watched it on Youtube. But it does mean that you can have the pleasure of watching this shitty battle scene for yourself.

The set-up for the battle is all wrong. Pansa and Hirtius are nowhere around, having already been executed by Mark Antony (Vincent Regan), and poor Decimus isn’t even a character in the story. Instead, Antony has become a vicious tyrant in Rome and Octavius (Santiago Cabrera) has run off to Gaul and found Julius Caesar’s legendary 3rd Legion sitting around in Gaul for the past two decades. He’s persuaded them to fight. But they’re (of course) badly outnumbered; they’re just the remnant of the 3rd Legion and 20 years older than before, while Antony has six legions. (But don’t worry; being outnumbered never has any impact on the battle whatsoever.) Antony is accompanied by General Rapax (Graham McTavish) and Tyrannus (Jonathan Cake), while Octavius has Marcus Agrippa (Chris Egan) with him. None of that makes any sense whatsoever, but you shouldn’t be surprised by that at this point.

The clip opens with Antony and Rapax on horseback. Rapax is so bad a bad guy that they’ve given him black armor, while Antony is proving he’s a bad guy by ordering Rapax to kill people during a battle. Antony’s armor has at least a vague resemblance to what actual Roman soldiers wore in this period (although he’s not wearing a helmet), while Rapax’s armor is just silly. But it’s positively museum-grade compared to the nonsense that Octavius and his forces are wearing, which is just a mishmash of generic crap armor.

I couldn’t find any pics from the Battle of Mutina, so here’s how a much better show dressed their Roman soldiers

The battle takes place in a forest. While we don’t really know much about the topography of the real battle, it’s pretty damn unlikely it was fought in a forest, because forests are lousy places to fight pitched battles. The trees and uneven terrain make keeping a solid formation nearly impossible, and loss of formation was typically deadly to Roman troops. Since both sides are Roman soldiers, they ought to be drawn up in very tight ranks, shoulder to shoulder, with multiple ranks standing behind the front line. The men on both sides ought to be carrying scuti, curved rectangular shields that cover much of the body, and gladii, short swords. Some of Antony’s troops are equipped roughly the way they ought to be, but are not in proper formation. Octavius’ troops, however, are just milling around in disorganized clumps, and are carrying anachronistic small round shields.

Antony’s forces come running through the trees in a disorganized mess, some of them on horseback. In this period, cavalry was usually kept on the wings of the army, used to make flanking attacks and to prevent the opponent from maneuvering on the field. Octavian responds by ordering his men to do an all-out charge (when in reality Roman advances were done at a slow run so as not to lose formation). Octavius’ archers then begin firing into the melee, presumably killing and wounding men on both sides. So we’ve established that no one involved in the production of this miniseries knew a damn thing about Roman warfare, or in fact warfare at all.

The battle is depicted as having no formation or structure at all, with individual pairs of combatants scattered around the battlefield, and troops from both sides coming in from both sides of the screen. After killing someone, the surviving combatant then looks around for another person to attack. So each man is fighting without any support from his fellow soldiers, and can easily be attacked from behind. Antony fights from horseback with a gladius, a really dumb thing to do, because on horseback a gladius isn’t long enough to reach foot soldiers. None of the principle characters wear helmets, obviously because the viewer has to be able to identify them. Normally I can accept that convention, but here, surrounded by so much egregious stupidity, it just looks moronic.

Vincent Regan makes a habit of appearing in things I violently dislike

 

Then at the 1:47 mark, Agrippa tells Octavius “they’re rolling over us.” Octavius’ response is to shout “hold the line!” This is stupid for two reasons. 1) It amounts to shouting “fight harder!”, which probably isn’t helpful battlefield advice to beleaguered troops, who are probably fighting as hard as they can not to die. 2) More importantly, THERE ISN’T A LINE TO HOLD, YOU IDIOT! YOU SENT THEM INTO BATTLE WITH NO FORMATION! ‘Hold the line’ means ‘keep in formation.’

Then Tyrannus, using his patented Badass Two-Gladius Fighting technique kills someone who says “Hail, Caesar,” like that means something, and Tyrannus realizes he’s fighting on the wrong side and decides to start killing Antony’s men, and his soldiers decide to switch sides too, becauase they’re none too keen to be fighting under a general named Rapax, I guess, because when you work for someone whose name is the ancient equivalent of Johnny McPsychopathicKiller, you probably start of suspect he’s a bad guy and you might be on the wrong side.

Rapax is just about to kill Agrippa when Tyrannus distracts Rapax by throwing one of his swords at him. In general, while throwing swords looks cool in movies, disarming yourself is a really dumb thing to do when you’re surrounded by guys who want to kill you. Then Tyrannus says “we who are about to die, salute you,” as he kills Rapax, because that sounds really cool and sort of clever if you don’t bother to think about it at all.

Then Antony meets Octavius and they fight. Despite the fact that Antony is obviously a much better fighter than Octavius, Octavius disarms him and forces him to surrender, but chooses to be merciful and not kill Antony. Historically, it’s correct that Antony survived the battle, because, as I explained last time, the two of them created an alliance and ruled the Empire jointly for several years before having their final falling out and fighting and Octavian winning and Antony committing suicide. But the miniseries presents Mutina as the end of the whole conflict, and suggests that Octavian became ‘Caesar’, by which it means emperor, in 44 BC, rather than in 31 BC. So not killing the deranged guy who’s gone on a murder spree looks pretty dimwitted because what’s to stop him from throwing more orgies and trying to kill you with asps again? Still, the thought that they might have tried to cover the next 12 years of history and add a couple extra hours to this shitstain of a miniseries makes me glad that everyone involved just threw up their hands and called it quits after Mutina.

I feel like a need an exorcism to get this thing out of my head.

This Klingon Beauty Queen is much more authentic than anything in this miniseries

This set of reviews was paid for by Victor, who viciously  generously donated to my Paypal account and asked me to review Empire. So, umm, thanks, Victor. I think. If you want me to review a movie or show, please make a donation to my account and tell me what you’d like me to review, but please, make it something a little better than Empire, because I don’t know if I can handle another one like that. Assuming I can get access to the film or series, I’ll do a review.

 

 

The Admiral: Lots of Naval Battles

Tags

17th Century Netherlands, Charles Dance, Charles II, Derek De Lint, Early Modern Europe, Freeedom, Johan de Witt, Michiel de Ruyter, Military Stuff, The Admiral, The Four Days Battle

In my previous post, I summarized a lot of 17^th century Dutch history so I could make a post about The Admiral (aka Michiel de Ruyter, 2015, dir. Roel Reiné, Dutch with English subtitles). The film in question follows the career of Michiel de Ruyter (Frank Lammers) both as a naval commander and as a figure in 17^th century Dutch politics. Because de Ruyter’s career is to some extent tied to the political career of Grand Pensioner Johan de Witt (Barry Atsma), the film also looks at him a good deal.

The film, which opens in 1653 with the Battle of Scheveningen during the First Anglo-Dutch War, gets the basic Dutch political tensions correct. De Witt and therefore de Ruyter are correctly shown as representing the Republican position and therefore being in conflict with the Orangists. It’s clear that the Orangists want Prince William (Egbert-Jan Weber) to have more power in government, but the film never really gets at what is at stake for these two factions beyond which group will run the country. The film makes only the briefest allusion to the conflict between the strict Calvinist and tolerant Calvinists when de Witt says during a speech that his country is free because every many is free to decide how they will worship God. This is, in fact, a loosely correct expression of de Witt’s actual position, and it’s nice to see a historical film that actually explains what it means by ‘freedom’ (cough Braveheart 300 cough).

It likewise gets the basic facts about the Dutch conflicts with England correct. It makes it clear that commercial rivalry played a significant role in these wars, although it doesn’t connect de Witt’s party to the wealthy merchants who stood to benefit the most from long-range trade. Perhaps because de Witt is allied to de Ruyter, the focus of the film, de Witt’s motives are presented as being entirely good and without self-interest while the English and the Orangists other than Prince William himself as shown to be more self-serving and malicious. Charles II (a well-cast Charles Dance) at one point tried to bribe William by offering to make him king of the Netherlands, an offer William indignantly rejects.

Ever wonder what Ron Jeremy would look like if he were a 17th century Dutch admiral? Wonder no more

The film is particularly proud of the Netherlands’ Republican history. It opens with the false claim that the Netherlands is the “only republic in the world”. This ignores the fact that Venice was also a republic throughout the 17^th century (and had been for centuries), and that in 1653, England was a republic as well. Given that Charles II is a key villain in the story, the film-makers probably decided to ignore the story of England’s unsuccessful experiment with republicanism simply because explaining why England is a republic at the start of the film but a monarchy a few years later would be a distraction from the main story.

Not only does William refuse to subvert the Republic, de Witt orders the execution of an Orangist who was plotting with Charles. This is a reference to Johan Kievit, but in the film it’s not Kievit who does the plotting, because Kievit (Derek de Lint) is, along with Charles, the master villain of the piece. Throughout the film, Kievit malevolently scowls at de Witt, plots to remove him in favor of Prince William, supports Tromp against de Ruyter, and orchestrates the murder of the de Witt brothers. His motives are never explained beyond general villainousness.

Kievit (de Lint) and Prince William (Weber)

The film also plays fast and loose with chronology. Although Prince William was only 3 years old in 1653, he’s an adult in the film. The film covers 23 years of actual history, but no one ages. De Ruyter’s children are still children at the end of the film. The film repeatedly compresses events, giving the sense that the First Anglo-Dutch War, the Second Anglo-Dutch War and the Third Anglo-Dutch War all took place over the course of perhaps a year, instead of the 20 years they actually took. Charles II signs of the Peace of Breda (1667) and then immediately schemes with Louis XIV to invade the Netherlands, even though that happened in 1672. This makes no sense at all, since he signs the Peace of Breda because he’s lost his whole fleet and therefore cannot continue fighting.

One of the better elements of the film is that it works hard to make naval combat intelligible. It shows a half-dozen battles, and frequently cuts to a bird’s eye view so the viewer can get a sense of how the ships are maneuvering. It spends a great deal of time on the Four Days’ Battle, showing crewmen doing a wide range of jobs and demonstrating just how terrible a problem wooden shrapnel was in naval combat. If you’re looking for a movie about wooden ships and what it takes to run them, you’ll like this movie.

Unfortunately, it also takes substantial liberties with the facts of the battles. For example, the film collapses the Four Day’s Battle and the St. James’ Day Battle into one event, moving Tromp’s decision to break the line and pursue the English from the latter battle to the former and making that decision the reason that de Ruyter lost the Four Days’ Battle, when in fact the Dutch more or less won that. In the film’s version of the Battle of Texel, de Ruyter orders Tromp to break the line, thus tricking the English into sailing too close to the Dutch coast, which causes the ships to haul over to one side, leaving them vulnerable to Dutch cannon fire and giving the Dutch a decisive victory that forced the English out of the war. That bears little resemblance to the actual Battle of Texel, which was more like a stand-off. The Raid on the Medway involved several days of cannon fire and a large group of marines, not a midnight sneak up the river with a handful of men.

So from a historical standpoint, the film is something of a mixed bag. It gets the big picture broadly correct, but fudges a lot of the details in the name of a simpler narrative. It also smacks a bit of Braveheart-style nationalistic chest-thumping, but without the histrionic speeches. However the topic is refreshing. How many movies about 17^th century naval warfare have you seen?

Want to Know More?

The Admiral is available on Amazon.

I couldn’t find anything on Michiel de Ruyter, but if you want to know more about Johan de Witt (who was an important philosopher and mathematician as well as politician), take a look at Johan de Witt: Philosopher of ‘True Freedom’

Robin Hood: The Battle on the Beach

Tags

Cate Blanchett, Medieval England, Medieval Europe, Military Stuff, Ridley Scott, Robin Hood, Russell Crowe

 

After a lot of exam grading and brief digression for Westworld, it’s time to get back to the Russell Crowe Robin Hood (2010, dir. Ridley Scott). The film culminates in a battle on the beach somewhere along the southeast coast of English. The evil French are launching an invasion, and it’s up to Robin Hood to help King John stop them.

You can watch the scene on Youtube.

There is so much wrongness here it’s hard to know where to begin. So let me just count the problems.

• The French are using amphibious vehicles to get their troops onto the shore. This is technology way beyond anything medieval people had. The earliest amphibious vehicle was built in 1787. I’m not aware of one being used for military purposes until World War II.
• Initially, the English forces are on top of the cliffs watching the French land. They have archers, and open fire on them. But then they decide to send their troops down to the beach to fight. This is just dumb. Up on the cliffs, the French can do nothing except take casualties until they can get up the cliffs somehow. But sending troops down to the beach means that the archers need to stop firing to avoid hitting the English soldiers. So the English forces throw away their advantage for no reason at all.
• Robin Hood (Russell Crowe) is an archer. That’s what he was doing on crusade. There’s no evidence that he has any military experience beyond that. He’s a lowly foot soldier. He’s certainly not a knight, since his father was a stonemason. So why the hell is he given command of the English forces?
• The English charge on the beach is totally undressed; there’s no line of horses to allow a lance charge to have a massed impact. These knights clearly don’t know how to make a charge as a unit.
• Why is Friar Tuck (Mark Addy) fighting?
• Why is Marion (Cate Blanchett) fighting? Why did they even bring her to a battle? So she can be attacked and inspire Robin to fight harder?
• Why does Robin jump off his horse and tackle Sir Godfrey (Mark Strong)? On horseback, he has an advantage over Godfrey; on foot he doesn’t. He immediately draws his sword, so he doesn’t jump because he has no weapon.
• Why does Sir Godfrey suddenly turn, jump on a horse and ride off? There’s no sign the French are losing, although some of their boats are crashing together. And where the hell is he riding to? He’s riding away from the boats. Is his horse going swim back to France?

Basically, there’s no way this battle ever happened anywhere in the Middle Ages.

This review was made possible by a generous donation from Lyn R. If you want me to review a specific film, please donate $10 or more and tell me what movie you’d like me to review, and I’ll do my best to track it down and review it, as long as I think it’s appropriate.

Want to Know More?

Robin Hood  is available on Amazon.

Ben Hur: The Trailer

Tags

Ancient Rome, Ben Hur, Military Stuff, Quinqueremes

The remake of Ben Hur (2016, dir. Timur Bekmambetov) is opening this weekend, and I haven’t said anything about it on this blog yet. Let’s take a look at the trailer.

 

The first part of the trailer features a naval battle, and judging from what we see in the trailer, it looks like the film gets the basic facts right. Ancient Mediterranean naval combat relied on galleys that could sail for transport but were rowed during combat. The basic tactic used first by the Greeks and later by the Carthaginians and Romans was to row their ship as fast as possible into the side of the enemy ship and punch a hole in the hull using the bronze prow, which acted as a battering ram. If successful, the enemy ship would start to take on water and sink.

(An alternate tactic was to maneuver alongside the opposing ship and smash through its oars, leaving it crippled and vulnerable to a subsequent direct hit or being boarded by marines.)

A modern reconstruction of a Greek trireme

As a result, speed and maneuverability were the critical traits for Graeco-Roman ships. That’s why the emphasized rowers rather than sails. Large numbers of rowers working in unison could propel the ship faster and more reliably than the wind. But at some point making the ship wider to accommodate more rowers would have made the ship slower in the water. Instead, the Greeks pioneered a technique of stacking decks of rowers one above the other, with the oars being slightly off-set so they wouldn’t get tangled. At first these galleys were biremes (having two decks of rowers), and then triremes (with three decks). The Romans eventually embraced the quinquereme. Scholars argue about exactly how the oars were arranged on a ship like this, but the most common theory was that a quinquereme was not a ship with five banks of oars, but rather a type of trireme with three banks of oars, two of which were manned two to an oar with one bank manned by a single rower. Thus these were ‘five rower’ ships, not ‘five-oar’ ships.

A diagram of how the oars were placed

Rowing a complex ship like this took a great deal of practice, because all the oars had to be moved at the same time; otherwise they would foul each other. The need for complete coordination is the reason that these ships employed a drummer, to help the rowers keep the proper rhythm. A quiquereme is thought to have required 300 rowers, and the Romans found the easiest way to ensure the crews of their ships was to use slave rowers. So criminals could be sentenced to serve as rowers, which is what happens to Ben Hur in the novel and the film.

And that’s exactly what we see in the film (although I suspect the detail of the man tied to the prow of the ship is just made up). So props to Bekmanbetov for getting the tactical details right. (300: 2, I’m looking at you. You were supposed to be using exactly this system, although with free citizen rowers.)

However, there’s a problem. I’m unclear when this version of Ben Hur is set, but the novel and the 1959 version are set in 28 AD and the years just after, since Ben Hur’s life is synchronous with the life of Jesus. However, after 31 BC, the Romans ruled the entire Mediterranean basin, and from that point on down to the late 4^th century AD, the only major naval battle in the Mediterranean was during the civil war between Constantine and Licinius in 324 AD. In the late 20s or 30s AD, the Empire was firmly under the control of Tiberius, so there was no one to fight. The Romans continued to maintain galleys throughout the Imperial period, but there simply weren’t any naval battles happening. So I have no idea who Ben Hur’s ship is going up against.

Still, at least it looks like the battle is plausible.

Once I’ve had a chance to see the film in the theater, I’ll have more to say about it.

Game of Thrones: The Battle of the Boneheads

Tags

D.B. Weiss, Game of Thrones, Jon Snow, Kit Harrington, Medieval Europe, Military Stuff, Ramsey Bolton, The Battle of the Bastards, Winterfell

So on this week’s episode of Game of Thrones (S06E09, “The Battle of the Bastards”) we finally got to see the confrontation between Jon Snow (Kit Harrington) and Ramsey Bolton (Iwan Rheon). According to D.B. Weiss, speaking in the post-episode analysis, this was their opportunity to show “a true medieval pitched battle, where two sides bring all the forces they can into play…and they go at each other until one of them wins and the other one loses.” But if what they were trying to do is give the viewers a “true medieval pitched battle,” they failed pretty badly. I’m not really an expert in medieval warfare, although I have taught a class on the topic (history departments ask people to teach all sorts of things outside their research fields…), and as the battle sequence went on, I got more and more irritated, because pretty much everyone involved behaves stupidly at one point or another. And the battle itself is a poor representation of a medieval field battle.

The Forces

Let’s start by talking about the troops involved. Snow’s forces are described as being outnumbered 2 to 1, so he seems to be commanding a force of around 2,000 men against Bolton’s 4,000. During the scene in the command tent before the battle, the map they are looking at would seem to suggest a 3 to 1 ratio, which would suggest that the Bolton forces are closer to 6,000. So the whole battle involves between perhaps 6 and 8,000 men.

He has two major sets of troops: Wildlings and Westeros Cavalry. Right away we run into the problem that the show is mixing chronologically disparate forces. The Wildlings are typical Hollywood barbarians, using swords, long knives, and bows, and wearing nothing better than furs for armor. They represent a Hollywood version of early medieval Germanic tribesmen. The Wildlings are basically light infantry—lightly armored and highly mobile, which makes them good for raiding and skirmishing, but poorly suited for open-field battles except against other light infantry.

Ygritte and Tormund, equipped like typical Wildlings

The rest of Snow’s troops are Westeros cavalry, basically high medieval knights; they wear a mixture of leather, chainmail, and plate armor, but none of them seem to be as heavily armored as a 14^th or 15^th century knight would be (when the Knights of the Vale show up, they are properly armored as late medieval knights). Their initial tactic is a lance charge, which aims to break infantry because the lance has a much longer reach than most infantry weapons, but to be really effective, the charge has to be done en masse with a properly dressed line (meaning that the horses are all roughly abreast). Only fairly disciplined infantry will be able to hold formation in the face of a large group of knights on horseback charging across the field; less disciplined troops will generally break ranks and scatter. After the lance charge, the Westeros cavalry follows up with swords for close fighting.

In contrast, Bolton’s forces are structured around what I’ll call Westeros infantry, Northerners living south of the Wall. They wear leather armor and iron helmets, putting them in the category of late medieval medium infantry. They fight using pikes, long spears capable of reaching an opponent long before the opponent can reach them. They’re well-disciplined, which means they can probably withstand a cavalry charge, since their pikes can hit the knights or the horses before the knights’ lances can hit them. Additionally, because horses will not knowingly charge into an unmoving object, the horses are likely going to slow down as they near the infantry line, weakening the force of the charge.

Bolton’s infantry contains troops equipped with special shields, large enough to cover an entire human body. This is a rough approximation of a late medieval pavise, a large convex shield that often had a spike on the bottom to enable it to be set into the ground and remain standing. Historically, a pavise was usually carried by a soldier whose entire job was to carry the shield, while a second man, armed with a crossbow, fired at the enemy. After taking a shot, the crossbowman would duck behind the pavise, which provided cover while the crossbow was being reloaded.

The Bolton Pavisers

But Bolton’s men are trained in an entirely different tactic, one that draws off of ancient phalanx warfare and early medieval shield walls. The paviser advances in a line with his fellows, and then plants the pavise on the ground, creating a literal wall of shields, while his teammate, armed with a pike, stands behind the pavise and attacks over the shield. The spike on the pavise makes it hard for an opponent to knock down the pavise assuming the paviser is bracing it. These two-man teams operate in 3 or 4 ranks, so that if one team is killed, the team behind them can step in to close the gap. On command, the pavisers lift the pavise, advance, and then replant it. It’s an ingenious weapons system and one that’s certainly possible with late medieval technology, but to the best of my knowledge, no such weapon system was ever employed anywhere in world history. The closest parallel I know of is the Greek hoplite phalanx, in which each man carries a shield and spear and relies on the ranks of men behind him to keep him from being pushed backward; it’s similar, but not the same.

Bolton also has a large force of Westeros cavalry and a large number of archers armed with late medieval Welsh longbows. He has far more archers than Snow does, and perhaps roughly the same number of cavalry, because during the first phase of the battle, the two cavalry units cancel each other out and we don’t see them later on, suggesting most of them have been forcibly dismounted during the initial clash.

The Battle of the Bastards could never happen in medieval Europe, because there never was a point when early medieval light infantry, high medieval cavalry, late medieval medium infantry, and late medieval longbowmen were all present at the same battle. Nor were the Bolton pavisers a real thing. So this battle is at best a pastiche of medieval battles. And in the post-episode interview, it’s noteworthy that the two historical inspirations mentioned by Weiss, namely the battle of Cannae and the American civil war, are not medieval; Cannae was fought between the Romans and the Carthaginians in 216 BC, while the American Civil War was fought in the 1860s.

One nice detail though is that the troops are arranged in ranks and units. The way the troops are positioned on the battlefield looks plausibly medieval. Ramsey probably should have positioned his cavalry on the flanks of his position rather than behind the archers, because if they are on the flanks, they could protect the Bolton forces from flanking maneuvers. But perhaps Ramsey is assuming that Snow won’t risk a flanking maneuver knowing how small his army is.

A good shot showing the organization into ranks and units

 

The Battle of the Boneheads

Another reason this sequence isn’t really indicative of medieval battles is that nearly everyone in the battle engages in rampant stupidity. Yes, medieval generals occasionally did dumb things, but this much idiocy, evenly spread around the field, simply strains credulity.

Bonehead 1: Sansa Stark (Sophie Turner). She knows that Little Finger and the Knights of the Vale are on their way to help, but she never once mentions this fact during the tactical meeting before the battle. The intelligent thing to do is to tell Jon that if he waits a few more days, they will have a lot more troops to work with. Instead, she allows her brother to risk their entire military force in a desperate gamble against bad odds. (And while I’m on the subject of Sansa, somehow, by the end of the battle, she’s moved from the Snow side to behind the Bolton side, because the Knights of the Vale ride past her as they are bearing down on the back of Bolton’s position.)

Bonehead 2: Jon Snow. Snow’s battle plan as discussed in the tactical meeting is to get the Boltons to go on the offensive against the center of his line, whch is the Wildlings. The Wildlings will fall back, drawing the Bolton forces deeper in and enabling Snow’s cavalry and archers to encircle them, thus trapping them in a pincer movement. This strikes me as a lousy plan for several reasons. First, the Wildlings simply cannot stand up against a proper knightly charge; they lack the discipline, as Tormund actually comments at one point, and without spears they have no hope of stopping a cavalry charge. So when Bolton’s cavalry charges, the Wildlings will not so much fall back tactically as they will scatter and rout. That means the cavalry will not be trapped in an encircling maneuver because they can simply ride out through the back end and wheel around to attack the encircling troops from behind. If this is actually Snow’s plan, it’s a bad one.

Additionally, given that Bolton had a lot of archers, he has no reason to bother advancing further than arrow range. He can just order his archers to rain arrows down on Snow’s position, causing casualties while taking few himself (since Snow has fewer archers). Snow is gambling that he can goad Ramsey into charging, but he has no clear plan for how he’s going to do that. Jon might be a good swordsman, but he seems to be a shitty general.

Bonehead 3: Melisandre (Carice van Houten). The woman is a witch, capable of working magic. Some of her magic requires royal blood, but some of it doesn’t, since she apparently changes her appearance without royal blood, and she can perform pyromancy (divination by fire-gazing). So why doesn’t she help out with magic? Maybe she can’t conjure a shadow demon without king’s blood, but is she really completely useless? Can’t she use her pyromancy to give Jon some warning of what he might face? And even if she can’t, why doesn’t he ask for her help anyway; he doesn’t know her limits.

Bonehead 4: Rickon Stark. He doesn’t seem to understand that running in a straight line from a guy with excellent archery skills is a losing proposition. He ought to be zig-zagging, because it reduces the odds of Ramsey hitting him. Ok, he’s young and frightened, so I suppose we can overlook that. But still, not bright.

Should have zig-zagged, kid

Bonehead 5: Jon Snow again. Despite being warned that Ramsey will goad him into doing something foolish, he lets Ramsey goad him into doing something foolish, namely charging the Bolton forces on his own. His stupidity nearly destroys everything, because if he’s killed at this point, the battle is pretty obviously over before it starts. Yes, he’s supposed to be furious, but Kit Harrington’s mediocre acting skills mean that he just can’t sell it to the viewer.

The result is that Snow’s forces have to make an unplanned charge against the Bolton line under withering arrow fire. The cavalry line starts out dressed, but quickly loses coherence and loses most of its value as a massed charge. The cavalry charge forces Tormund to commit the Wildlings to also charge across the field, and they also lose all formation. This fits popular imagination of how medieval battles happen, but bears little relationship to actual medieval battles, which were much more organized than we see here. (incidentally, high and late medieval cavalry rarely made lance charges against other cavalry, except during tournaments. That was far more dangerous than charging infantry. So that’s another way the Battle of the Bastards isn’t medieval.)

Also Snow, Ramsey, Tormund, Davos and every other character is going bare-headed, which is suicidally dumb. But it’s clearly done to allow the audiences to see who’s doing what, so I suppose we can forgive it. What’s harder to explain is the near total lack of shields and decent armor. Snow charges into battle wearing nothing but a coat of plates.

Note the lack of helmets and metal armor

Bonehead 6: Ramsey Bolton. Instead of using his pike infantry to break the charge of the Snow cavalry, which is something that late medieval infantry was quite good at, he orders his cavalry to counter-charge, which means he winds up losing most of his cavalry as the two forces decimate each other. A needless waste of men.

Bonehead 7: Ramsey Bolton again. Ramsey has more men in the battle, by a ratio of 2 or 3 to 1, although he hasn’t sent in his pikemen and pavisers yet. When he orders his archers to open fire, that means his archers have a greater chance of killing Bolton troops than Snow troops, simply because there are more Bolton troops on the field. Ordering his men to continue firing is presented as villainy, especially since Davos refuses to do the same thing, but what he’s really doing is evening the odds and helping Jon Snow. And it simply wasn’t done historically, because it’s a really dumb thing to do.

One of the unexplained puzzles of Game of Thrones is how Ramsey, who is clearly a psychopath willing to kill anyone around him, maintains the discipline and loyalty of his troops. Killing his own men is going to demoralize the other troops who are watching this, because they know that when they go into battle, he might continue this archery. My best guess is that Ramsey actually has an unmentioned magical ability that inspires loyalty. Maybe THAT’s what the ritual of burning the flayed and crucified corpses does.

Bonehead 8: The giant. He’s obviously much stronger than a normal man, but he’s fighting with his bare hands. What he ought to be doing is using some sort of club or similar mass weapon, because that would enhance his ability to attack infantry. He would have been much more successful at smashing through the line of pavisers with a club. And given that he’s much stronger than the pavisers, he could surely push a hole through them if he focused. Smart like ox, strong like tractor.

Bonehead 9: Davos (Liam Cunningham). Instead of committing his archers to fight as regular infantry, he ought to have maneuvered his archers to enable them to either start firing on Bolton’s archers or the pavisers. The encircling tactic the pavisers use must be well-known in the North, so it can’t have been a surprise. So once the pavisers get deployed, Davos’ archers would be able to pick them off from behind. Pike infantry loses most of its effectiveness if it loses unit cohesion, and being attacked from behind would do just that. Perhaps not totally boneheaded, but probably short-sighted.

Bonehead 10: Ramsey Bolton once more. Despite having a surplus of troops, he doesn’t bother sending out scouts to make sure that Snow doesn’t have any troops sneaking up on him from another position. How do we know he didn’t do this? Because the massive force of the Knights of the Vale were able to sneak up on him. Having scouts and lookouts is just basic tactical sense, and Ramsey’s forces are clearly battle-hardened, so Ramsey must have learned the value of scouting before this.

Some scouts might have prevented this

So what should Jon Snow have done? Not fight at all. He should have focused his efforts on things the Wildlings are good at, like raiding and skirmishing. He could have harassed Bolton’s forces, drawn them into ambushes, and otherwise disrupted Ramsey’s ability to project an image of strength and competence. Eventually, Ramsey would have made a mistake that Jon could have pounced on. Yes, winter is coming, but the Wildlings know how to handle winter.

 

Another Problem with the Battle

As the fight goes on, the field develops a large mound of corpses roughly 10-12 feet high. Ramsey uses that to trap Snow’s forces by encircling them with the pavisers and slowly tightening the circle. When Snow’s troops try to climb the mound of bodies, Bolton’s infantry drives them back into the killing zone. The only thing that saves Snow’s men is the arrival of the Knights of the Vale.

Snow’s army trapped by the pavisers

But it’s highly unlikely that this battle would generate such a mound of corpses. First, given that the entire battle involves less than 10,000 men (at least until the Knights of the Vale arrive), it’s unlikely that there were enough casualties to create such a mound. Yes, such mounds did occasionally form during Civil War battles, but those were battles with many more troops; battles with 30-40,000 combatants were not uncommon, and 19^th century gunpowder weapons could cut down large numbers of men in one spot. But at the point by which the mound has formed, it’s unlikely that more than 3000 men are dead. And those corpses would have been strewn across the battlefield, not concentrated in one place.

There is only one medieval battle I know of where a mound of corpses is said to have become an issue, and that’s the battle of Agincourt in 1415. At Agincourt, the English successfully channeled the attacking French into an increasingly narrow zone by positioning themselves between two groves of trees and then erecting stakes to restrict where the horses could charge. Chronicle sources do claim that a mound of bodies as tall as a man formed and that the French infantry had to climb over the bodies to get to the English, which blunted the force of their charge. So as the French charged, they were slowed by the bodies ahead of them and the English archers were able to cut them down and add to the pile. But that’s because the French had a restricted zone through which they could move, whereas at the Battle of the Bastards, the Bolton end of the field appears to be entirely unmodified, except for six burning crosses. There is no reason why charging troops would have to climb over a slowing growing pile of bodies when they could more easily run around it.

So although the battle sequence is well-filmed, it doesn’t give the viewer much of a sense of what a genuine medieval battle could have looked like. It’s a fantasy battle.

 

One Other Thing: Winterfell is supposed to be an incredibly strong fortress, but it certainly doesn’t look like it in this episode. The castle seems to have been built on flat ground. Its main gateway consists of a stone wall perhaps 20 feet high, flanked by a pair of towers at least 30 feet high. It has only a single gate followed by a short tunnel (really just a deep alcove), and no portcullis. Nor does it have a moat. Nor are there projecting towers or walls to restrict an opponent’s ability to approach the gateway or attack them as they do so. Once the giant manages to break the beam holding the gate closed, there is absolutely nothing to stop Snow’s remaining forces from entered the castle bailey.

 

Note the lack of a gatehouse, just a deep doorway

Here’s a shot of Winterfell from a different episode.

It looks imposing, until you notice how the land slopes upward on the right side, but the wall stays the same height. A teenager with a decent step-stool could break in at that point.

Winterfell pretty much breaks all the major rules of castle building. Castles were almost never situated on open ground within flat terrain, because there’s nothing to stop enemies from simply marching past it, other than the threat of being attacked from behind by the castle forces. As the second picture shows, there are much higher hills nearby that would be better spots for a castle, because castles were typically situated on steep hills or alongside rivers or cliffs, because features like sharply restrict where an attacking force can attack from, and attacking up-hill is difficult.Ccastles are generally built on strategically important spots, like a gorge between high hills (which allow it to control land travel) or alongside a river (allowing it to control water travel). If you have to put a castle out in the open, you put a deep ditch around it, so that the enemy can’t just walk up to the walls.

Here’s a much better example of what the approach to a castle looks like–heavily fortified, with a long tunnel to pass through, providing multiple points for doors or portcullises and places where the garrison can attack the invaders (through holes in the ceiling of the tunnel, for example). Not every castle has a barbican, but a major fortress like Winterfell ought to.

Given how quickly the giant smashed his way into the castle, any reasonable army with a strong battering ram would get in just as fast. The lowness of the walls means that they’re easily scalable, and the lack of a moat means that the enemies can roll siege towers right up to the wall and just walk over onto the parapets. It’s a strikingly unimpressive castle, given the talk about how strong it’s supposed to be.

 

Update: It’s nice to see that in the next episode, Sansa admits that she was foolish to not tell Jon about the Knights of the Vale being on their way.

 

Want to Know More?

Rather than referring you to books, like I usually do, I’ll just link to a couple other commentaries on the Battle of the Bastards sequence, which has drawn a lot of analysis.

Here’s an examination of the tactics of the battle as they unfold, in case you had trouble following it. I totally agree that the director did a great job of making the battle make sense.

Acclaimed medieval historian Kelly DeVries has some thoughts about the battle.

This commentator liked the sequence more than I did, although he has a number of the same objections I have about armor.