Pozdně středověká pěchota: štít armády a konec středověku?

Abstract

Medieval infantry is often seen as a kind of “poor relation” of heavy cavalry. However, the issue of this branch of the military is a bit more complicated, all the more so if we look at the matter not retrospectively, but rather with a view to the future developments that awaited the infantry in the early modern period. Perhaps we can accept the general statement that strong infantry arose where the belligerent, no matter what its institutional nature, could not for some reason afford strong cavalry. Typical examples are the various Scottish rebellions or, for example, the famous Battle of Courtrai in 1302. In a similar “infantry” category, one can of course include the armies of the Swiss Commonwealth, the Hussite armies, including the very late one, which ended somewhat symbolically only in 1504 in the defensive battle of Schönberg. If we were to find the least common denominator of the way infantry was deployed in the Middle Ages, it is defensiveness, and a very static one at that. Almost any technical innovation that was (re)introduced served primarily to strengthen its defensive capabilities. Thus, in various manuals, the infantry functioned as a kind of “shield of the army” that deflects the first blow, and the cavalry then leads the attack as the “sword of the army”. The development indicated above moved to a new qualitative level at the turn of the 15th and 16th centuries. Then a new type of infantry emerged, no longer ‘medieval’ in the sense of being defensive, but capable of both effective defence and, above all, attack and manoeuvre. The annotated study traces the above-mentioned development of the infantry’s functioning in the Middle Ages and the early modern period, as well as circulating some traditional ideas related to the role of the infantry in the context of medieval warfare.