My review of Daniel Baloup's L’Homme armé from the Medieval Review

Baloup, Daniel. L’Homme armé: expériences de la guerre et du combat en Castille au XVe siècle. Madrid: Casa de Velaázquez, 2022. Pp. 309. €35.00 (pb). ISBN: 978-84-9096-361-6. Reviewed by Steven Muhlberger Nipissing University steve.muhlberger@gmail.com Daniel Baloup has written a massive book that seeks to reconstruct the place of warfare in the culture of Castile during the fifteenth century and to show how people of different types took part in it. His approach is more like a reference work than a monograph. The title is somewhat deceptive. Contemporary sources and modern scholars both have used “man-at-arms” to designate one type of warrior. Baloup is far more inclusive. He takes as his subject all types of warriors and others who were affected by war. Baloup does not neglect any of them. His self-set task is to create an “anthropology of the Castilian wars of the 15th century.”

L’Homme armé is divided into two parts, which are further divided into six substantial chapters.

Part one (two chapters) is “Thinking and writing on war” and is a survey of the literary sources and the writers and theoreticians who devoted themselves to the subject. B. places the writings of such people in their social and military contexts. Not many of these writers are well known but in some cases we have a rather full portrait. Chapter I, 1 is devoted to the case of Lope Garcia de Salazar, a prolific chronicler who has much to say about warriors, war and politics. Most of the writers cited by B. do not provide us with as much material as Lope Garcia de Salazar, but the historians, clerical writers, and biographers, taken together, provide a more extensive picture of what warriors thought and shared with each other than one might have expected. Chapter 2 is a detailed discussion of the historiographical characteristics of noble-written chronicles. Chapter 3 explores, rather briefly, women's involvement in war. I was rather surprised that more was not said about the role of women in romance literature who might be relevant to the themes of the book. Chapter 4 is concerned with the role of clergy (rather, of prelates) in war. B. begins with canonical legislation that restricted the participation of prelates and progresses to a long description of fifteenth-century prelates actually commanding troops and fighting. This is one of the longest and most interesting sections of the book.

Part two has four chapters on “The Culture of war and warlike practice.” I was particularly impressed by Chapter 5, “The Army in the shadows,” which gives a rather full survey of the communal militias that took on a particular importance because of their participation in the many wars foreign and domestic in and around Castile. The activities of the “commons” are often underrated by military historians. B. does better than most in bringing them out of the shadows. Similarly B. gives us a good amount of attention to clerics who not only preached and theorized about war but fought on the battlefield. Chapter 6 constitutes an interesting exploration of the dangers of warfare and the way warriors’ reaction to those dangers contributed to noble identity--a complicated subject.

I noticed too that B. seldom uses the word “chivalry.“ This a defensible position since chivalry means so many things that one can get lost in its complexities. More relevant to his subject are such characterizations of how nobles were motivated and gained renown: by service (to the land and the king) or by noble descent or personal reputation. These values could easily come into conflict, and such conflicts shaped life in fifteenth-century Castile. Various readers will come to this book for different reasons. Specialists in the history of the fifteenth century may find it to be a useful reference tool; beside the analytical material in the body of the text, there is a very large bibliography and indices of personal and place-names. Researchers whose main interest is not warfare in Castile but other topics such as chivalry, the literature of war, or the evolution of nobility, who wish to make wide comparative studies and include Castilian manifestations of their subjects, may find Baloup a valuable guide. Certainly the “anthropological” approach adopted by Baloup gives readers the opportunity to construct a fuller picture of war in Castile and warfare in general during the fifteenth century.