Nr="89"Military Intelligence and Long-Term Planning in the Ninth Century : The Carolingians and Their Adversaries

Abstract

Abstract: Historians of warfare in the western tradition have devoted considerable attention to the problem of military intelligence from the Greek and Persian wars of the fifth century B.C.E. up to the recent past. Strikingly absent from this conversation, however, has been the treatment of the acquisition and analysis of information for military purposes in pre-Crusade Europe, particularly in the Carolingian and immediate post-Carolingian world. In part, this lacuna is the result of a general neglect by modern scholars of military matters in the ninth and tenth centuries. A second major reason for the lack of studies of military intelligence is the dead hand of nineteenth-century romantic-nationalist historiography that has imposed a “dark-age” straight-jacket on many aspects of the history of the early medieval world. This emphatically includes the history of warfare, which has been treated in the context of a putatively Tacitean or Beowulfian quest for honor and booty, rather than as a highly complex element of governmental activity. The present study addresses this gap in modern understanding of the complex nature of early medieval warfare through an examination of military intelligence in the ninth century with a focus on the Carolingians and their opponents, primarily the Vikings, the Muslim polity in Spain, and the Slavs. The study is divided into three parts that examine in turn, strategic intelligence, campaign intelligence, and tactical or battlefield intelligence.