War and Game

Greek troops in Thessaly. The inadequately prepared Greek combat forces numbered around 100,000 men, of which approximately 500 were lost. In comparison, Turkish forces numbered around 400,000, with 1,500 losses.

Brief war won by Turkey but also benefiting Greece due to the intervention of major European powers. The Greco–Turkish War of 1897 ended in an easy victory for Turkey. It began in April 1897 with clashes across the Greco–Turkish border, which at the time ran between Thessaly and Ottoman-held Macedonia. The hostilities ended in May 1897 when the Turkish army drove the Greeks back deep into Greek territory.

The war grew out of tension between Greece and Turkey that was fueled by a Greek uprising on the Ottoman-controlled island of Crete. Calling for a more dynamic stance by Greece toward Turkey, the Greek nationalist organization Ethniké Hetairia (National Association) orchestrated an incursion into Turkish territory by Greek irregular troops (March 1897), apparently with the knowledge of the Greek government. Although Turkish forces repulsed the irregulars, the incident led to a break in diplomatic relations between Greece and Turkey and a massing of their respective armies on the mountainous frontier between Greek Thessaly and Ottoman Epirus and Macedonia.

The Greek army, consisting of two divisions, was unable to capitalize on its early incursions across the Macedonia–Thessaly border and suffered defeats in several battles around the mountain passes between Macedonia and Thessaly south of Mount Olympus. The Greek front collapsed on 12 April 1897, and the Greek forces began to retreat into the Thessalian plain. Within two weeks and with little resistance, the Turkish army controlled all of Thessaly, including its major towns of Larissa and Volos. There was relatively little activity on the western front in Epirus, where the Turkish army successfully repulsed the Greek offensive.

The war came to an end when the advancing Turkish army scored another two victories in battles on the mountains that divide the Thessalian plain from the rest of Greece, thus consolidating its control over Thessaly. The danger that further Greek territories would fall to the Ottomans prompted Russia’s Czar Nicholas II, with the support of other European governments, to intervene and persuade Sultan Abdülhamit to agree to a cease-fire; it was signed by the combatants on 7 May 1897, although the end of the war was not formally agreed upon by the Greek and Turkish governments until November 1897. Because of the involvement of Russia and the other European powers in the resolution of the conflict, the Ottoman Empire gained very little from its victory except monetary compensation and slight changes to its borderline that it considered strategically advantageous. In an important gesture that served to acknowledge Greece’s original grievances, the European powers prevailed upon Abdühamit to accept previously Ottoman-ruled Crete as an autonomous region.

Bibliography Dakin, Douglas. The Greek Struggle in Macedonia, 1897–1913. Thessaloniki, Greece: Institute for Balkan Studies, 1993.

‘‘Mamlūk’’ meant ‘‘owned,’’ or ‘‘slave,’’ with the special connotation of ‘‘Caucasian military slave.’’ This was because most early Mamlūks were Central Asian-Turkic or Caucasus slaves who were imported to Syria and Egypt by the Abbasid caliphs of Baghdad to reinforce Arab tribal levies which were losing their military edge, and reputation, within the Arab empire. By convention, ‘‘Mamlūk’’ refers to the dynasty and military elites while ‘‘Mamlūk’’ is used for ordinary slave soldiers. By the 9th century the Abbasids accepted annual shipments of Mamlūks as tribute. A major expansion of Mamlūk service followed as Turks displaced Arabs and Iranians from military service within the caliphate. As the Muslim states became increasingly military rather than civilian-religious empires, Turkic-speakers and soldiers became the predominant political class—a position they retained in the Middle East for a thousand years. In 868 a Mamlūk dynasty was founded in Egypt, the first breakaway state from the unified empire of the caliphs. In Iran, too, Turkic-speaking slave soldiers dominated, culminating in the military slave dynasty of the Ghaznavids (962–1186). The Umayyad Caliphate in al-Andalus, with its capital at Córdoba until the early 11th century, employed northern and western European slaves captured as boys, castrated, and trained as Mamlūks. A Mamlūk dynasty ruled large parts of northern India for a time after 1206, but it was always weaker than its Middle Eastern counterparts as it lacked a ready source of new recruits. Training fell by the wayside and the Indian Mamlūks were compelled to share power with local civilians. A new bevy of Mamlūks were brought to Egypt by Salāh al-Dīn (Saladin, 1137–1193), who pushed aside the last Berber Fatamid caliph to rule in his name, then put his family on the sultan’s throne as the Ayyubid dynasty. He relied heavily on loyal Mamlūk soldiers. After crushing a Crusader army under Louis IX, a rebellion led by the Mamlūk general Baybārs overthrew and murdered the Ayyubid sultan, Turan Shah. The Ayyubids tried to elevate a female sultan— Shajar al-Durr—as a replacement but this garnered wider support for the rebels from Muslims who could not conceive of being ruled by a woman. Mamlūk-governed Egypt is conventionally periodized as the Bahri (River) Mamlūk era, 1250–1382, and the Burji (Citadel)Mamlūk period, 1382–1517. 

In 1260 the Mamlūks defeated the Mongols in Galilee at Ayn Jālut. The next year the remnant of the Abbasid caliphate moved to Cairo (from Baghdad, which succumbed to the Mongols in 1258). This did not alter the fact of rule by Mamlūk sultans over Egypt and Syria. The Mamlūks actually benefitted from Mongol disruption of northern trade routes, which diverted goods into Mamlūk ships plying the Indian Ocean and Red Sea. The Mamlūks crushed the last Crusader state, besieging and storming Acre (including with suicide squads) in 1291. After that defeat, the Latins surrendered Tyre and all other strongholds without further fighting. To the south, the Mamlūks expanded into Alwa in southern Nubia, pushing that Christian state to relocate deeper south after 1316. Having tamed the last of the Crusaders, the Mamlūks governed Palestine and Syria until 1400, when they were beaten at Aleppo by Timur and Syria was lost to them. It was not recovered until Timur’s unstable empire fell apart after his death.

Timur’s unstable empire fell apart after his death. Since the children of Mamlūks were originally forbidden to become knights, the Mamlūk dynasty continually drew fresh supplies of Turkish-Russian slaves to renew military formations. This meant that the language of the Mamlūk ruling class was Turkic, with many slave soldiers also unable to speak Arabic. The later Mamlūk system was semi-feudal: an officer was granted land from which he drew revenue (he still lived in barracks in Cairo) to sustain himself and perhaps some soldiers, too. By this time recruitment had changed, so that Mongols, Circassians, Greeks, Turks, and Kurds were also to be found in Mamlūk barracks. After 1383 the Mamlūk sultans were usually also the main commanders. Although they sometimes trained as lancers and could fight as medium-to-heavy cavalry, the Mamlūk military specialty was mounted archery. They were trained to hit a small circular target at 75 yards’ range, five shots out of five, and to loose arrows at a pace of 6 to 8 per minute. They were originally formed to fight nomadic light cavalry and trained to equal or best the Bedouin in the skills of mounted archery. When fighting was hand-to-hand, heavier Mamlūk armor and weapons and superior discipline and training meant they usually prevailed. This militarily conservative system was superb and effective against the normal threats faced by Egypt: Bedouin from the desert, North African nomadic warriors, and distant Nubians. It remained to be tested against more modern forces gathering to the north in the Ottoman Empire.

The Apostle of Christ and Holy War. A painting attributed to the Circle of Juan de Flandes (c.1510–20) of Saint James fighting the Moors. He is shown carrying the banner of the Spanish military order bearing his name, the Order of Santiago. The incongruity of this transformation of one of Jesus’s disciples into a warrior saint escaped most medieval observers.

In Spain, as in the Baltic, crusading was secondary or complementary to secular considerations and wider association of Christian conquest and holy war. A decade before the First Crusade, Alphonso VI of Castile had characterized his capture of Toledo from the Moors in 1085 ‘with Christ as my leader’ as a restoration of Christian territory and the recreation of ‘a holy place’. It is not entirely clear how far the explicit religiosity of twelfth-century accounts of earlier campaigns against the Moors in Spain reflected the assimilation of crusading formulae, an older tradition of holy war or a separate local development. While defence and restoration of Christian lands matched the new rhetoric of the Jerusalem war, indigenous writers and religious leaders transformed the Iberian patronal saint, the Apostle James the Great, Santiago, into a ‘knight of Christ’ and heavenly intercessor for the success of Christian warfare. Such promotion of a distinctive pan-Iberian war cult helped local rulers retain ownership of their campaigns even when enjoying papal crusade privileges while at the same time reinforcing Christian solidarity. St James, an international saint through his shrine at Compostella, did not become the exclusive preserve of any one Iberian kingdom, his cult sustaining the political ideologies of all of them. The same was generally true of the half dozen Iberian Military Orders founded in the second half of the twelfth century, including one dedicated to St James.

Crusading in Spain adopted a local flavour. The great warrior kings of the thirteenth century, Ferdinand III of Castile (1217–52) and James I of Aragon (1213–76), rolled back the Muslim frontier self-consciously in the name of God and each flirted with carrying the fight beyond Iberia, to Africa or Palestine. Yet neither found the commitment that led their contemporary Louis IX of France to the Nile. Although some conquests, such as the capture of Cordoba by Ferdinand III in 1236, were accompanied by religious gestures of restoration and purification familiar from the eastern crusades, and in places, as at Seville (captured 1247), foreign Christian settlers were recruited, much of the Reconquista involved negotiation and accommodation of the religious and civil liberties of the conquered: James I ‘the Conqueror’ of Aragon’s annexation of Mallorca (1229) and Valencia (1238), and Ferdinand III’s conquest of Murcia (1243). Christian complaints about the calls of the muezzin persisted in some areas for centuries. Although suffering from the problems of being ruled by an elite with separate laws and religion, Muslims under Christian rule, the mudejars, and Jews and converts – conversos (Jewish converts to Christianity) and Moriscos (Muslim converts) – were a feature of Spanish life until the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when a recrudescence of a manufactured neo-crusading religious militancy led to the imposition of intolerant Christian uniformity under the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand II of Aragon (1479–1516) and Isabella of Castile (1474–1504), coinciding with the final expulsion of the Moorish rulers from Granada (1492). This new identification of a crusading mission, which persisted under Charles V and Philip II, depended as heavily on recasting Castile, in particular, as itself a new Holy Land with a providential world mission as it did on genuine Aragonese crusading traditions. In turn, this spawned a myth of the crusading reconquista and the providential identity and destiny of Catholic Spain later insidiously expropriated by General Franco and his fascist apologists, academic as well as political.

The fate of Peter II of Aragon (1196–1213), father of James the Conqueror, reveals the nuances and contradictions in the Iberian experience. The twelfth-century invasion of Spain by the Almohads, Muslim puritans from North Africa, had placed the Christian advances of the previous century in jeopardy. In 1212, a large international crusader host combined with Iberian kings to resist. Before confronting the Almohad forces at Las Navas de Tolosa, most of the French contingents abandoned Peter and the kings of Castile and Navarre, partly over disagreements over the local rulers’ leniency towards defeated Muslim garrisons, a frontier pragmatism that, as in Palestine, struck the French as scandalous. They also did not care for the heat. The subsequent Christian victory became, as a result, almost wholly a Spanish triumph, a useful detail in the later projection of Spanish destiny. Fourteenth months later Peter was defeated and killed at the battle of Muret in Languedoc by an army of French crusaders led by the church’s champion, Simon de Montfort, testimony to the political cross-currents upon the surface of which crusading bobbed, and the impossibility of divorcing ‘crusade’ history from its secular context.

After the conquests, new (or in propaganda terms restored) sacred and secular landscapes were created, from converting mosques to churches to changing Arabic place names. In some areas, notably in Castile, immigrant settlement from further north was encouraged. Elsewhere, the pre-conquest social and religious structures felt only modest immediate impact. It may be significant of a decline in frontier militarism that after 1300, the cult of Santiago faded before that of the Virgin Mary. Nonetheless, the holy war tradition, in its crusading wrapping, persisted amongst the knightly and noble classes, available to those engaged in wars against infidels, Muslim or heathen, a living cultural force as well as a stereotype. While his captains were observing West Africans outside the straitjacket of crusading aesthetics, the Portuguese prince Henry the Navigator (1394–1460) fervently embraced crusading aspirations and campaigned in North Africa. As late as 1578, a Portuguese king, Sebastian, at the head of an international force armed with indulgences and papal legates, fought and died in battle against the Muslims of Morocco. The penetration of Latin Christendom into the islands of the eastern Atlantic in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries attracted crusading grants for the dilatio, or extension, of Christendom. The Iberian tradition ensured a sympathetic hearing for the Genoese crusade enthusiast Christopher Columbus. It formed one strand in the conceptual justification for the conquest of the Americas and, more tenuously, in the mentality of the slave trade which some saw as a vehicle for expanding Christianity. This was made possible by the idea, popular by c.1500, that Spain itself (however imagined) was a holy land, its Christian inhabitants new Israelites, tempered and proved in the fire of the Reconquista, championing God’s cause whether against infidels outside Christendom or heretics within.

Archery (kyudo; literally “the way of the bow”) was the weapon most closely associated with warriors and was in common use by the end of the prehistoric era, during the fourth or fifth centuries C.E. While the term kyudo is more common today, kyujutsu (“technique of the bow”) was used to describe archery in the age of the samurai.

Warriors practiced several types of archery, according to changes in weaponry and the role of the military in different periods. Mounted archery, also known as military archery, was the most prized of warrior skills and was practiced consistently by professional soldiers from the outset in Japan. Different procedures were followed that distinguished archery intended as warrior training from contests or religious practices in which form and formality were of primary importance. Civil archery entailed shooting from a standing position, and emphasis was placed upon form rather than meeting a target accurately. By far the most common type of archery in Japan, civil or civilian archery contests did not provide sufficient preparation for battle, and remained largely ceremonial. By contrast, military training entailed mounted maneuvers in which infantry troops with bow and arrow supported equestrian archers. Mock battles were staged, sometimes as a show of force to dissuade enemy forces from attacking. While early medieval warfare often began with a formalized archery contest between commanders, deployment of firearms and the constant warfare of the 15th and 16th centuries ultimately led to the decline of archery in battle. In the Edo period archery was considered an art, and members of the warrior classes participated in archery contests that venerated this technique as the most favored weapon of the samurai.

In the earliest Japanese literary sources, military figures relied upon horse and arrow. Yet in the popular imagination, the samurai is always linked with the sword. In fact, swords were an important symbol of samurai status, particularly during the Edo period and afterward. However, as the warrior tradition began to develop, the most important weapon was the bow. The classic image of a medieval warrior with a long bow astride a dashing stallion does not accurately describe the typical soldier of the Heian through late Kamakura periods. However, many high-ranking samurai and those employed by wealthy domain owners were known for their equestrian archery skills. By the 14th century, as armies increased in size and outfitting sizable battalions became costly, even foot soldiers (ashigaru) were equipped with the relatively inexpensive bow and arrow, thus shattering the legendary exclusivity of warrior arts as “the way of the bow and horse.” Nonetheless, in the middle years of the feudal period, the bow gradually declined in prominence, with foot soldiers preferring to use naginata, a polearm with a curved blade, and then the straight spear (yari) after about 1450 C.E. The firearm eventually displaced archery in the arsenals of most samurai in the late 16th century. Thereafter, samurai continued to practice archery, though mostly as a spiritual and physical discipline and a popular form of entertainment, rather than as a martial skill for practical use.

Most ranking warriors carried several weapons in addition to their bows and arrows, one of which was a sword. Considered a viable defense only in hand-to-hand combat, the sword had disadvantages, such as fairly common concerns like broken blades or the prospect of complete loss if the weapon was lodged firmly in a corpse. Further, swords had symbolic associations with divinity and elite warriors, and were expensive and difficult to obtain for average samurai of low or middle rank. By contrast, arrows were plentiful, easily replaced, and more reliable. Thus, among the many military arts listed above, archery remained the traditional samurai specialty, although medieval Japanese swords were considerably more refined than those made in medieval Europe, where the sword was the weapon of choice. Foot soldiers, often excluded from the ranks of true samurai, were more likely to utilize polearms and spears.

Archery was widely regarded as the best way to ascertain a warrior’s abilities. In many military tales, samurai skills were assessed by the length of arrow (measured in fists or hand-widths) used to strike a target from a moving horse. Battles were occasionally settled not by entire armies but through a mounted archery duel performed by samurai leaders. Opponents would aim arrows while riding toward each other, using one arrow for each pass. Several passes might be used to determine the victor, rather than fighting until death of one party. Usually, fatal wounds were inflicted only after soldiers fired several arrows, not because their aim was poor, but rather because Japanese armor was skillfully designed to deflect such blows.

Typical samurai bows measured from about five feet long to more than eight feet, and about two-thirds of the bow was situated above the hand grip. These are generally classified as longbows, although they differ in form from similar weapons called longbows used in medieval European warfare. Japanese wooden bows had to be long to generate the power to launch arrows while remaining flexible and strong, since laminated wood and composite materials could separate if flexed strenuously. Handgrips placed in the center of such long bows would have made equestrian archery impossible, and would not have balanced the elasticity of the upper portion of the bow. Therefore, the handgrip was placed off-center, producing bows that bent in an asymmetrical fashion, which facilitated drawing the bow, reduced stress on the bent wood, and made mounted archery possible for those who were well trained. Less-experienced archers such as foot soldiers often used bows that were shorter and easier to manipulate. However, the Chronicle of the Wei Dynasty (Weizhi) notes that Chinese envoys saw Japanese archers using bows with shorter lower portions and longer upper sections by the mid-third century, although there is no mention of equestrian practices at the time.

From the Kamakura period, bows were constructed in layers utilizing bamboo slats for added strength and flexibility. The core of the bow was made of stiff wood and was combined with laminated pieces of bamboo. After the 15th century, the sides of the bow were laminated with bamboo slats, and the wooden core of the bow was thus completely encased in bamboo. For added strength, cane was wound around the stave of the bow. While in theory the cane bow was finished with lacquer for additional protection, this was not always the case in practice.

There were numerous kinds of arrows and arrowheads, intended to perform specific functions based on the desired point of contact. The average arrows were about 12 fists in length, although both longer and shorter arrows survive. Arrow length depended upon the skill of the archer and the desired target. During the medieval era, most samurai favored arrows between 86 and 96 centimeters (about 34–38 inches) in length. Arrow shafts were made of bamboo harvested in early winter and shaved to remove the outer bark and joint nodes. The shaft was straightened and softened by placing it in hot sand.

Arrowheads were fastened to the shafts by a system of flanges similar to the tangs seen on swords. These arrows had three or four fletchings made from the wing or tail feathers of varied species of bird. The shaft of the arrow was fashioned from young bamboo. In the early medieval period, arrow shafts were carried in devices called ebira, which resembled a woven chair. These quivers were worn on the hip and made from pieces of woven wood. Later, quivers called utsubo were used, which were wood, covered in fur, and worn across the back. Like other military equipment, the various components used by archers were manufactured and distributed in various locations, but the shapes and styles of these tools of war were quite consistent throughout medieval and early modern times, and across all regions of Japan.

Some forms of archery practiced in Japan were not intended to serve as preparation for battle. Mounted archery was ritualized in Japan beginning in the early 11th century with the practice called yabusame. Often performed for emperors or shoguns to glorify military training and celebrate samurai achievements, this ceremonial pastime involved four distinct movements. The designated primary archer first pointed a drawn arrow at the sky, and then the ground, to symbolize harmony between heaven and earth. Mounted archers would then begin to shoot at targets two meters away composed of five concentric circles in multiple hues. These targets were about 60 meters apart with a surface area of 60 square centimeters, and the archers aimed as they rode their horses at full gallop around a track. In the third movement, soldiers who had struck all three targets were invited to aim at three clay targets that were about one-third the size of targets in the second movement. Finally, the primary archer inspected all of the targets to determine who had demonstrated the best military prowess. Yabusame is still practiced today and is seen as an enduring symbol of Japan’s traditional military arts.