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With his drama "Henry V", Shakespeare memorialized the triumph of the English king over the "terrible superiority" of the French knights at Azincourt in 1415.
As in other battles of the Hundred Years War, the English owed their victory to their longbow archers, whose shooting performances are also popularized by popular culture.
The English riflemen became the best known example of lightly armed foot soldiers who ended the centuries-old dominance of the heavily armed armored rider on the battlefield at the end of the Middle Ages.
However, it is overlooked that the penetration power of the longbow was an exception, which was limited to the British Isles.
It was only there that the crown made it possible for free subjects to acquire, through regular training over several generations, the ability to successfully attack knights with a long-range weapon in large firing sequences.
On the continent, the long despised infantry achieved military advancement with less subtle weapons, as the Chemnitz medievalist Martin Clauss explains in his new "Military History of the Middle Ages" (CH Beck, 128 pp., 9.95 euros).
Here it was the halberd or halberd with which foot soldiers took noble knights from their horses.
The halberd and other polearms could not deny their origins in the rural world
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With the hook of the halberd, riders could be fetched from their horses
Source: Heritage Art / Heritage Images via
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It was a light, about head-high polearm that connected a spear to an ax and often a hook with which a rider could be pulled from the horse.
"Since the length of the shaft gave the cut additional energy, even heavy armor could be penetrated with the hook," writes Clauss.
This made "the halberd an offensive weapon that should compensate for the height advantage of the riders".
The glaive, in which a curved, sharpened blade replaced the ax, was equally effective.
The spear, which could be up to five meters long, was created as a defensive weapon.
This was held at the hips or at shoulder height, or the end of it was supported in the ground in order to ward off onrushing riders.
Like the war flail or the war sickle, these weapons came from the milieu of the peasants and shepherds, but were quickly adopted by the militias of the cities and by the mercenary troops who took them into service.
Five foot soldiers of the early modern period and a Turkish horseman, by Albrecht Dürer (around 1495)
Source: Heritage Art / Heritage Images via
Iron hats with a brim or a sallet (from a shell), which was characterized by a neck protector, were used to protect against blows from above, i.e. from horseback.
Instead of expensive tanks, foot soldiers wielded shields or so-called paveses, head-high shields that could be brought together to form mobile shield walls.
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Another innovation was decisive.
Since individual infantrymen had no chance against shock attacks by armored riders, they were grouped into closed formations.
But that meant that the bearers of halberds, pikes and long-range weapons coordinated their actions.
So they had to submit to a discipline that contradicted the knightly mentality.
The knights Leopold I of Austria experienced this painfully when they wanted to bring the federal peasants to reason near Morgarten in 1315, got into a cleverly chosen ambush and were massacred by the hundreds.
Soon the Swiss violence would rise to become the most feared foot soldiers in Europe who, with the Burgundians, put an end to the most modern army of the 15th century.
Discipline and tactics have since become key qualifications in European military history.
The infantry career also represents a change in political and social structures.
In the aristocratic warrior culture of knights, foot soldiers had only played a subordinate role.
That changed with the rise of cities, whose mentality was shaped by efficiency and discipline.
Citizens practiced defending their commune with arms.
And the cities had the economic power to develop new weapons or to purchase them in large numbers and, if necessary, to employ mercenary troops.
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The winner in the end, however, was the princely sovereign.
Only he had the resources to mobilize mass armies and modern firearms for large-scale campaigns.
The Swiss had to experience this in 1515 when they lost the aura of their invincibility forever against Francis I of France near Marignano not far from Milan.
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