The Journal of Military History

The military organisation of the Medieval Low Countries is now mostly covered by modern regional studies. For the county of Flanders, we have long possessed the trailblazing work of that great military historian Jan Frans Verbruggen. For the Bishopric of Liège, there is the work of Claude Gaier. Even the county of Holland can now boast books by M. J. Waale, Antheun Janse and Ronald de Graaf. Most of these works, however, have appeared only in Dutch and French, so a book in English on the duchy of Brabant by Sergio Boffa may be deemed welcome. Boffa follows what by now is a well-established formula. He first presents a narrative of the period on which he focuses: that of the wars fought by the ducal couple Wenceslas and Joan from 1356 to 1406. This is followed by a section on "The Powers," that is, the key politico-military actors, the duke and duchess, their household and administrative officers and the three estates. Sections on "combatants" and "organisation" complete the book.

The study presents a useful, informative snapshot of a militarily well-organised and developed principality which is based on an extensive knowledge of primary sources. Some may be disappointed that Boffa, on the whole, displays little concern with comparing Brabant with developments elsewhere. Nonetheless, the attentive reader will quickly realise that his study gives no support to the claims that northwestern Europe was at the time in the grip of either an "Infantry Revolution" or a technological, missile weapon revolution. Just as in the other regions of the Low Countries, fourteenth-century Brabant continued to possess a traditional military organisation which fought wars dominated by the heavy cavalry of the nobility. Although highly urbanised and wealthy, like Flanders and Holland, Brabant's town militias (though armed increasingly with crossbows) played an essentially secondary role in war.

The lack of explicit engagement with a broader context is one area of disappointment. Another is that, in concentrating on purely Brabançon affairs, the book often reads like a mere catalogue of disjointed events, actors and phenomena. These are shortcomings that have become common in the fashionable "military organisation" genre. One sadly misses the underlying conceptual framework which marked the work of the exemplary Verbruggen [End Page 217] and which gave his studies, even when they concerned issues of detail, an inner coherence and strength, as well as a broader relevance and deeper meaning. Compare Verbruggen's magisterial 1958 article on "Militaire dienst in het graafschap Vlaanderen" (Military Service in the County of Flanders) with Boffa's attempt (pp. 201–6) to redefine the distinctions between various types of military service. Some of Verbruggen's key assumptions may have become questionable in the light of the best, mostly French, and mostly non-military, medieval historiography of the past forty years. His understanding of the art of war was a traditional one which underrated the critical role of peculiar normative and legal frameworks in regulating and guiding medieval warfare. But that does not diminish the importance of possessing a solid grand framework, especially since the most prominent new grand "theorising" by the "military revolution" adherents is conceptually so poor. Although Boffa—however much by accident—supplies ammunition for a counterattack, for one to succeed it must be part of a well-designed campaign that is informed by a conceptually rich and coherent framework for understanding medieval warfare.