(^68) Chapter Three
simplicity in use made it a great equalizer in the field. Armored caval
rymen need not always prevail when any able bodied commoner could
pull the trigger and unleash a crossbow bolt capable of knocking a
knight from his horse at a distance of a hundred yards or more. No
wonder the weapon was banned at the Second Lateran Council (1139)
as being too lethal for Christians to use against one another!
Crossbows and pikes had to be supplemented by cavalry for flank
protection and the pursuit of a vanquished foe. This obviously made
w^7 ar far more complicated than it had been when a headlong charge by
a group of knights dominated the battlefields of Europe. Simple per
sonal prowess, replicated within knightly families across the genera
tions, was no longer enough to win battles or maintain social domin
ion. Instead, an art of war was needed. Someone had to be able to
coordinate pikes, crossbows, and cavalry. Infantrymen needed train
ing to assure steadiness in the ranks, for, were their formation to break
apart, individual pikemen would find themselves at the mercy of
charging knights; and the time required to cock a crossbow meant that
archers, too, became, vulnerable each time they discharged their
weapons, unless some field fortification or an unbroken array of
friendly pikes could protect them until they were ready to shoot again.
Not surprisingly, Italian citizens were not able to achieve the elabo
rate coordination needed for such an art of war all at once. Cities in
other parts of Europe lagged still farther behind, relying mainly on
passive defense behind city walls. Nevertheless, the military balance
within Europe altered fundamentally with the transformation that
townsmen and their trading brought to rural society between 1000
and 1300. On balance, the complexity of the new art of war reinforced
localism. If prosperous cities found it difficult to exploit the new
techniques, it was doubly difficult for older territorial units—princi
palities, kingdoms, and, largest of all, the Holy Roman Empire, to
manage the new military resources effectively. Hence the changing
forms of economic and military power that arose in Latin Europe
during the eleventh and twelfth centuries led to the collapse of the
imperial fabric in the thirteenth. This was followed a generation later
by the failure of the papacy to erect a universal monarchy on the ruins
of the Holy Roman Empire (clear by 1305).
Both empire and papacy were heritages from the Roman past.
Memories of that past and its glories died hard, at least among political
theorists, who reluctantly reconciled themselves to the political
pluralism of rival sovereign states only in the seventeenth century.
Had Popes Innocent III (1198–1216) and Boniface VIII (1294–1303)
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