Product Description: This expansive book surveys the history of warfare from ancient Mesopotamia to the Gulf War in search of a deeper understanding of the origins of Western warfare and the reasons for its eminence today. Historian John France explores the experience of war around the globe, in Europe, Asia, Africa, and America...read more

Product Description: This is a major study of the ideas and practices involved in the making and breaking of peace treaties and truces from Classical Greece to the time of the Crusades. Leading specialists on war and peace in ancient and medieval history examine the creation of peace agreements, and explore the extent to which their terms could be manipulated to serve the interests of one side at the other's expense...read more

Product Description: The essential military tactics that have enabled commanders from Alexander the Great to General Giap to achieve victory on the battlefield.This groundbreaking book examines battle tactics that have achieved victory through the ages...read more

Product Description: This seventh volume of the Journal of Medieval Military History has a particular focus on western Europe in the late middle ages, and specifically the Hundred Years War; however, the breadth and diversity of approaches found in the modern study of medieval military history remains evident...read more

Product Description: Mercenaries have always had a poor press. Theirs is one of the world's oldest professions, but the very word has profoundly negative connotations of infidelity and ruthlessness. But if they were like this, were they so different from soldiers?

Product Description: The study of Medieval Warfare has developed enormously in recent years. The figure of the armoured mounted Knight, who was believed to have materialized in Carolingian times, long dominated all discussion of the subject. It is now understood that the knight emerged over a long period of time and that he was never alone on the field of conflict...read more

Product Description: The Crusades and the Expansion of Catholic Christendom, 1000-1714 is a fascinating and accessible survey that places the medieval Crusades in their European context, and examines, for the first time, their impact on European expansion...read more

This authoritative and concise work surveys the range of warfare in the high Middle Ages while reflecting on the society that produced these military struggles. The book brings together for the first time a wealth of information on such topics as knighthood, military organization, weaponry and fortifications, and warfare in the East. In 1095 with the launching of the First Crusade, Europeans established a great military endeavour to save the Holy Land, an undertaking that remained a central preoccupation until the end of the thirteenth century. While the expeditions that went forth to fight the Muslims involved armies of exceptional size, much of the warfare within western Europe itself was conducted by small armies on behalf of landowners who were often neighbours and kin. In his approach to his subject, John France considers political, social, and economic development in the age of the crusades. He emphasizes the significance of four factors in shaping medieval warfare: the dominance of land as a form of wealth, the limited competence of government, the state of technology that favoured defence over attack, and the geography and climate of western Europe. His coverage of the castle and the knight in armour depicts the role of landowners in producing these characteristic medieval instruments of war. In addition, France provides an extensive analysis of battles in which he reconstructs a series of encounters in superb detail.

Product Description: The success of the First Crusade, and its capture of Jerusalem in 1099, has been conventionally explained by its ideological and political motivation. This book looks at the First Crusade primarily as a military campaign and asks why it was so successful...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: The monk Rodulfus Glaber is best known for his Five Books of the Histories, a major source of information on events in the first half of the 11th century and the life and thought of an 11th-century monk. This edition, the first since 1866, presents the only critical text of the Histories along with a complete translation and full historical commentary...read more