Tag: Europeans

The breeding ground of honor [was] the state of semi-anarchy (when it was not complete anarchy) that prevailed in most of the world before the invention of the nation-state in early modern Europe. In such an environment, personal honor and the respect it elicited from others was almost the only instrument of social control, and this was still true to a considerable extent right through the [English] Tudor period. Describing the feud between two grandees in the reign of the first Queen Elizabeth, Lawrence Stone writes that “Both in the brutality of their tactics and in their immunity from the law, the nearest parallels to the Earl of Oxford and Sir Thomas Knyvett in the London of Queen Elizabeth are Al Capone and Dion O’Banion, Bugs Moran and Johnny Torrio in the Chicago of the 1920s.” Among such people, honor was a matter of grim necessity, a workaday proposition by which their power and status in the world were measured and on which their very lives depended.

— Honor: A History, p. 54

Emphases mine.

The princes of [the late Medieval Period] were not territorial in the sense of having a fixed settlement and identification with that locality and its people; that would come later. At this time, the sense of their subjects was too local to be national; and the princes’ sense of themselves and their property was determined by inheritance and to a much lesser extent by solidarity with a particular land or its inhabitants. They were not the monarchs of nations. The Henry V who fought at Agincourt to recover his property on the continent is unlikely to have spoken the sentiments of a nationalist, Renaissance author like Shakespeare in exhorting his men. For Harry, yes; but not necessarily for England and St. George. Nor were these princes of states; rather they governed realms, each with a rudimentary administrative apparatus that was impermanent and fixed only to the person of the prince….

— The Shield of Achilles, p. 78

If a gentleman issued or accepted a challenge in proper form and, fought like a gentleman, with a gentleman, then to be vanquished; was no defeat. Certainly it was nobler than suffering the insult or refusing the fight. And to be killed in a duel by your equal was, if not exactly a pleasure, at least honorable. Your grandchildren could tell of it proudly.

Courage, not manners, was the hallmark of a gentleman. As the duel epidemic spread, courage came to mean a thin skin and an unruly temper, the thinner and more unruly, the more gentlemanly. A gentleman was proud of his temper and indulged and cherished it. There may have been, off in remote country estates, phlegmatic gentlemen landowners, waistcoats bulging with good claret and venison, who chuckled at insults, waved them away, and opened another bottle, but in the cities, the armies, and the universities, prickliness was a point of pride, as proud youths in tough neighborhoods are quick to avenge being “dissed.” An easygoing temperament meant your blood was slow, and cold, and lowly.

In The Three Musketeers, the noble Aramis studies in the seminary for ten years to fulfill his dream of becoming an abbé, but a jealous officer insults him, and he quits the seminary and goes off to take fencing lessons daily for a year. Then he finds the officer, calls him out, and strikes him dead. “I am a gentleman born—my blood is warm,” he explains.

In The Tempest, Prospero threatens Ferdinand, son and heir to the king of Naples, and Ferdinand promptly draws his sword. Miranda cries, “0 dear father, make not too rash a trial of him, for he’s gentle, and not fearful.” By gentle, she doesn’t mean he’s kind to dogs and small children. She means he’s well-bred, and therefore bad tempered, armed and dangerous. Not to be trifled with.

As its first definition of “gentle,” the Oxford English Dictionary, both feet stubbornly planted in the past, gives “well-born, belonging to a family of position; originally used synonymously with noble, but afterwards distinguished from it, either as a wider term, or as designating a lower degree of rank. Also, in heraldic use: Having the rank or status of ‘gentleman,’ the distinguishing mark of which is the right to bear arms.”

Gentlemen bore arms. In the Scottish Highlands, where nobody would think of leaving the house without a sword, or perhaps even sitting down to dinner without one, true gentlemen distinguished themselves from their lowlier neighbors by a feather in the bonnet as well—as in “a feather in his cap”—but elsewhere only gentlemen were entitled to the sword. Swords were the badge of a man who needed no help “beyond that of his heart, his sword, and his valor.” The French called it “la noblesse de l’epee.”

— Gentlemen’s Blood, p. 28-29

Emphasis mine.

Despite repeated laws forbidding dueling, to deny a challenge marked one as unworthy. The abbé de Saint-Pierre charged in 1715 [C.E.] that [a military] officer who refused a challenge would “find himself forced by the other officers and by the commander himself to leave the regiment.”

One counts for nothing that an officer would rather pass for a coward…than to commit a mortal sin and a capital crime in formal disobedience of the law and the will of the prince; one counts for nothing that he does not want to risk his safety and the loss of the good graces of his king; he does not fight, therefore he is a coward; he is a coward, therefore he must be driven away.

The explanation for duels lay much more in the symbolic than in the real, for by their nature, duels were irrational. Ultimately, the aristocracy’s fighting spirit was driven by the individual’s drive to prove himself within the standard of his own class and thus win gloire. The nobility set standards that must be obeyed, or else the individual would lose caste. As one historian of the duel insists, dueling was “another religion.” A duel was a human sacrifice to the god of peer opinion, and so was a battle.

— Battle, p. 143

Emphasis mine.

The medieval system [of Europe] had been a rights-based system. Each member of that society had a particular place that determined rights, obligations, and a well-defined role. It is a familiar but erroneous portrait of the medieval era that depicts its society as uniform and colorless. Rights-based systems can in fact yield enormous diversity, because though conformity may be enforced by law, it is not necessarily enforced by that most pitiless of masters, the individual ambition; thus such systems often encourage creativity, as the natural exuberance of individuals attempts to circumvent the rigidity of their assigned roles and the received wisdom. Yet these systems often strike us as irrational in practice because they do not attempt to match talent and performance with role….

In the medieval period, there had been a universal system of customary law, based on the rights of inheritance, charters, and grants. Customary law is the common law of practices. We are inclined today to think of common law as generated by courts, but this is really an abbreviation: common law is simply the customary law of the judiciary; it grows and is modified by the exercise of court practices. The medieval period was almost entirely ruled by a kind of common law, but the generating institutions of that law were seldom judicial courts….

Precisely because the inherited institutions were rights-based, they could not promote new arrangements that were violative of the customary methods. A prince alone could not rewrite the constitutional rules of his society’s governance to meet his own needs; that would require an institution that objectified the needs of the prince but was distinct from the prince himself[—the future princely state].

— The Shield of Achilles, pp. 87-88

Emphasis mine.

Among the reforms of the army begun before the [French] Revolution was the development of the corps d’armée. Napoleon saw the value of this reform, adopting and developing it into what has been called his secret weapon. The Napoleonic army corps was a well-balanced unit comprising all arms: infantry, cavalry and artillery, with attached engineers, auxiliary trains and a headquarters staff. The corps was in effect an army in miniature, although its size, anywhere from 5,000 to 40,000 men, could rival that of many 18th-century armies. The corps would be made up of a number of infantry and cavalry divisions, each of two or more brigades with attached artillery. As Napoleon’s corps structured army went into battle against a traditionally organized enemy force, each of his corps, being a complete fighting force, could go into action without delay as soon as it arrived on the field. When [Marshal Louis-Nicolas] Davout, one of the pre-eminent corps commander of the period, brought his men by an epic forced march directly into the fray at Austerlitz, he undoubtedly stopped the great Russian envelopment of the French right which would have threatened to cut across Napoleon’s line of communication and make his position untenable. The size of a corps could vary and would depend on several factors, such as its particular task and the ability of its commanding general. To his step-son, Eugéne de Beauharnais, Napoleon in 1809 commented, ‘…a corps of 25,000-30,000 men can be left on its own. Well handled it can fight or alternatively avoid action…an opponent cannot force it to accept an engagement, but if it chooses to do so it can fight alone for a long time.‘

— Waterloo: New Perspectives, p. 115

Emphasis mine.

The old original war sword was so massive it sometimes required both hands. It had been designed—and worked splendidly if you were strong enough—for knocking an armored knight off his horse, but it was useless at close quarters except as a bludgeon. The duel of honor refined it.

From the mid-sixteenth century [C.E.] through the seventeenth, the rapier was the blade of choice. It was sharp-edged but used primarily for thrusting, not cutting, and it was a formidable piece, often nearly four feet long, topped by an elaborate hand guard, and weighed two and a half pounds. Wearing it advertised how tall as well as how brave you were: Four feet of steel hanging from your waist, and you swaggering around with it, made a statement.

Elizabethan London passed an ordinance against strolling the streets with more than a three-foot blade; if you came into the city with something longer, the gatekeepers were under orders to break off the extra inches. Even so, that’s a lot of blade, and it was often used in combination with a dagger for close work.

In 1599 [C.E.], a gentleman named George Silver published an attack on this newfangled monster, developed, he says, as a purely civilian weapon with no distinguished military history. It was, in effect, a costume accessory, ineffective for serious fighting. Once your opponent is past your point, he complained, it is too difficult to clear your weapon and bring the point to bear again; the length of the blade drags in the hand, and it tends to favor the thrust, which can be turned aside easily, over the cut that takes manly strength to avoid.

Not everyone agreed. Long after the rapier had evolved into lighter, shorter versions, some still swore by it. Late in the nineteenth century, Captain Sir Richard Burton, in The Sentiment of the Sword, wrote of it with passion:

Amongst all weapons the rapier alone has its inner meanings, its arcana, its mysteries. See how it interprets a man’s ideas. and obeys every turn of his thoughts! At once the blade that threatens and the shield that guards, it is now agile, supple, and intelligent; then slow, sturdy, and persevering; here, light and airy, prudent and supple; there, blind and unreflecting, angry and vindictive; I am almost tempted to call it, after sailor fashion, ‘she.’

— Gentlemen’s Blood, pp. 59-60

Emphasis mine.

The gun was ravaging the soul of the warrior. To many among them, virtually the whole purpose of battle was to demonstrate courage. Custom dictated that an international corps of heralds hung like scavengers about the battlefield, ascertaining brave deeds to be recorded by chroniclers. Bullets were making the whole process ridiculous; the standards of courage were becoming the standards of idiocy. Insistence on close-in fighting, elaborate rituals of identification, and pairing off were not just inappropriate on a battlefield full of guns; they helped reveal the impotence of the ruling classes.

The bullet-riddled environment of the sixteenth century [C.E.] demanded a basic redefinition of what constituted courage. This would take time; but an incident near Brussels in 1582, during the Dutch rebellion, foreshadowed the direction it took. It was an early-spring afternoon and Alexandro Farnese, the Duke of Parma, Philip II of Spain’s most famous general, decided to dine with his staff outdoors, near the trench works. No sooner had they sat down when a cannonball took off the head of a young Walloon officer, and a skull fragment also struck out the eye of another gentleman. The table was cleared only to have a second ball kill two more of the guests. Their blood and brains strewn over the previously festive board, the remaining diners lost all appetite and got up to leave. Yet Parma calmly insisted his guests resume their places, ordering his servants to take away the bodies and bring a clean tablecloth.

A traditional hero might have charged the cannon…not Parma. His response was passive disdain. If flesh and bone were unequal to flying lead and iron, the spirit was. Parma’s defiant hospitality was a prototype. One day men of courage would be inclined to stand fast and take it. Other than ferocious aggressiveness, not flinching became the sine qua non of the warrior class.

— Soul of the Sword, p. 124

All [medieval Japanese] warriors, regardless of rank, were trained in swordsmanship. Those of the upper ranks, of course, had more time to devote to the pursuit of excellence in this art, and to the pursuit of superior instructors—which explains why a retainer of lower rank, notwithstanding his longer exposure to the hardships of military life, was usually no match for a higher-ranking bushi in a duel. This type of situation…resembles that of Europe during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries [C.E.], when hardened veterans of countless battles were still no match for a well-trained aristocrat with a sword—the noble’s weapon which, with the rise of the bourgeoisie to power at the end of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, became known as the gentleman’s weapon.

— Secrets of the Samurai, pp. 254-55

The establishment of permanent units hastened the almost universal adoption of the proprietary system, which had already begun to replace the vestiges of feudalism and of free companies. The permanent colonel was the proprietor of his regiment, accepted by the king as a permanent officer and authorized (personally, and through him his captains) to raise men. Initially, with armies being raised only for a campaign and disbanded afterward, the troops raised by the proprietary system were volunteers, more or less carefully selected from the available and willing manpower. But as the armies became permanent, the standing units were not disbanded and were kept up to strength by regular influx of recruits, usually provided by the crown. This, combined with the financial considerations in maintaining year-round units, gave the crown increasing rights of supervision over the administration and training of the regiments, and thus somewhat restricted the proprietary right previously exercised by colonels and captains.

This proprietary system could be profitable. A commander was paid for the number of men he mustered, as well as for their weapons, equipment, and subsistence. In addition to the profit to be derived from economical exercise of his proprietorship (to say nothing of the possibilities offered by parsimony and fraud), an officer could sell his proprietary interest when he retired. Thus officers’ commissions were valuable, and could be purchased. This custom of purchase of commissions continued in some armies—notably that of England—long after the proprietary system itself had disappeared.

— The Encyclopedia of Military History, p. 527

Up until the start of the sixteenth century [C.E.] there were few solid principles of how best to fight with swords. Masters, mainly army veterans, passed on a hodgepodge of techniques, mixing together swordplay, dagger work, and wrestling moves—anything that would help their pupils survive. [Historian] Egerton Castle’s view was that “each individual master taught merely a collection of tricks that he had found, in the course of an eventful life, to be generally successful in personal encounters, and had practised until the ease and quickness acquired in their execution made them very dangerous to an unscientific opponent.” All that was about to change [by the emerging occupation of fencing master].

— By The Sword, p. 23

The sword had been quite sufficient for its gory tasks, but over the course of the eighteenth century [C.E.] the dueling pistol began to replace it, a switch that romantics like [Sir Richard] Burton lamented as “an ugly exchange of dull lead for polished steel.” During the transition, people sometimes used both at once. In 1690, in Ireland, the high sheriff of Country Down had an argument with a neighbor over dinner, and they fought with sword and pistol: One was run through with a sword and the other was shot. Both died. Sometimes, if the pistols misfired, the combatants threw them away and whipped out their reliable swords.

Slashing and killing a man with a sword offered visceral pleasures not found in guns. It was a physical experience. You held the sword in your hand and felt the flesh of your enemy give way under its point…. Your arm quivered to the crunch of bone and cartilage, and knew the spongy resistance of lung or bowel. His blood, probably mixed with yours, splashed your shoes. His face was close; you could see his eyes.

Another advantage of sword over pistol was that the damage done was directly related to the gravity of the occasion. In a casual matter, you could swoop in with the upward-cutting manchette blow that disabled his sword arm, ending the encounter and leaving him with nothing but a bruised elbow. Swords did what they were told to do. You could defend yourself with a sword and parry a thrust; the only way to parry a gun is to shoot the man who’s shooting it. A sword was always a sword, but pistols often misbehaved or misfired. The skillful swordsman could inflict as much or as little damage as he wanted, but pistol duels were fraught with accident and surprise. You could kill an old friend who’d laughed at the wrong moment, instead of merely flicking a drop of blood from his arm and then taking him out for a drink. Or you could hit the wrong target, which never happened with swords: In one duel in France, both parties fired simultaneously and simultaneously killed each other’s seconds.

When you’d killed a man with your personal sword and not by some proxy impersonal bullet, your soul had killed his. When the victor claimed the sword of the fallen as his right and broke it over his knee, killing him in effigy, generations quivered. When [Robert E.] Lee handed his sword to [Ulysses S.] Grant at Appomattox, strong men wept. Some say Grant wept.

With guns, the satisfaction was remote. You stood well separated by the agreed-on paces. Shoot your man and he crumples and falls, his weapon drops from his hand, but as far as your own hand knows he might have been struck by lightning. You didn’t press the bullet into his chest; it flew there by itself, mechanically. You were distanced from the action, like the pilot of a high-altitude bomber.

— Gentlemen’s Blood, pp. 72-75

Emphasis mine.

The Italians drew up the earliest dueling codes to protect and enforce honor; Flos duellatorum came out in 1410 [C.E.] and young gentlemen all over Europe studied its delicate ethical matters and the subtle new swordplay more suited to personal encounters than the slash-and-whack of battle. In 1550, Girolamo Muzio’s Il duello succeeded it and was even more popular. Italians opened fencing schools, attended by eager young gentlemen from all over, and sent fencing masters to the rest of Europe. By 1480, Germany had opened dueling schools called Fechtschulen that enjoyed the special protection of the emperor himself and established a tradition beloved by the military and university students well into the twentieth century—some say the twenty-first.

The notion of a gentleman defending his personal honor, the notion that obsessed the Western world for centuries and spilled many gallons of the bluest blood, now seems as remote as the urge to throw virgins down volcanoes. Nobody now cherishes his personal honor or inspects that of others. Short of indictable felonies, nobody cares. We wouldn’t know how to measure it; the concept has vanished. Military valor still lends some luster, though Vietnam cast a shadow on it, and large amounts of money command universal respect, but the word “honor” survives only in a few state documents yellowing under glass. Jefferson was fond of it.

Whatever honor was, only gentlemen had it. Only gentlemen needed to defend it, which made their lives more perilous than those of the lesser beings, who could shrug and laugh off an insult. If a lesser being sent a challenge to a gentleman, the gentleman also could shrug and laugh it off, or send some lackeys to beat the insolent fellow with cudgels.

“Gentleman” has today become a rather idle compliment rarely invoked. It even carries overtones of the sissy, quite the opposite of its old role. Now any upstart lad can spend a couple of days mastering gentlemanly requirements: use the accepted forms of address, hold the door open for a lady, remember to say “please” and “thank you” in social if not in business situations. Use your napkin, not the tablecloth. Don’t bully the waiter. Don’t wipe your nose on your sleeve. Once he’s learned the rules, he’s accepted as a gentleman with no questions asked, but in former times he’d be a scoundrel of the worst order. Aping his betters. Flying false colors.

Manners had nothing to do with it. You could be as rude, surly, and bad-tempered as you liked, beat your wife, rape your servants, strew illegitimate children far and wide, drink and gamble till the cows came home, and let your bills pile up for decades till your tailor and vintner starved, but you were always a gentleman because you were born one, and so was your son. It came down through your family by way of inherited estates and ancient medieval fiefdoms and service to your king. Its privileges were many; its responsibilities were bloody.

— Gentlemen’s Blood, pp. 24-26

Emphasis mine.

Strategic competition on the Italian peninsula provoked military innovation by Italian cities that were rich but weak. In the armies of the great powers, France, Aragon, and England, the number of soldiers raised by feudal levy was compounded with that raised by hiring mercenaries. Since the fourteenth century [C.E.], however, the Italian cities had relied entirely on privately organized professional armed forces. Single groups—the campagna di ventura—were recruited, supplied, and paid by their commanders, the condottieri, who sold their services to the highest bidder. The necessity for, and later the ambition of, the condottieri was a crucial element in the creation of the first modern states. For it was these mercenaries whose expensive services animated the need for the princely state, and whose ambitions then exploited the legitimating resources of that state, once the transfer of legal personality from the person of the prince to the princely state had occurred.

The condottiere was a contract employee. The word derives from the Italian for “contract,” condotta. The necessity to employ mercenaries became general on the peninsula once a few cities hired such forces because the shifting alliance structure of the region meant that no city could rely on the mercenaries of another. Once the superiority of the professionalized forces of the condottieri became clear, this innovation swept through all the cities of the peninsula as one after another mimicked the innovation lest it be engulfed by it. This necessity forced princes and oligarchs and ruling councils to rely more heavily on a bureaucratic apparatus, first to fund the condotte and later to provide for the acquisition of artillery. The condottieri themselves soon saw the advantage in turning their force on the authorities by whom they had been hired and supplanting them.

To rule the city he had seized, however, the usurping condottiere needed legitimacy. The condottieri took their contracts from a prince or oligarchy and hence from them alone derived the condottiere’s legal status. The princely state, however, once severed from the prince who brought it into being could provide a legal status for the condottiere apart from that of an employee of the prince or ruling council whom he had deposed. Thus this irony gave birth to the modern state and its unique problem, its problematic relation to the elusive status of legitimacy: only a State, however rudimentary, could provide the prince with the infrastructure necessary to maintain expensive mercenaries, but once this infrastructure was erected, it could also provide others with the means of exercising the power they had seized, and legitimate their doing so.

— The Shield of Achilles, pp. 81-82

Knights and chivalry faded out. The old orders of knighthood and chevaliers stayed firmly in place, as prestigious men’s clubs tend to do, but the original point of the knight had been as a fighting unit, a kind of mounted tank, impregnable in heavy metal, on a big strong horse, lumbering and clanking onto the field of battle peering through a slit in his helmet and poking his lance at enemies similarly encumbered. The idea was to push the enemy off his horse, since once unhorsed he lay helpless as an overturned turtle, ripe to be captured and held for ransom.

Henry V‘s nimble archers at Agincourt beat them easily. Joan of Arc was particularly outspoken on the subject; she said her heavenly messengers had told her that artillery was the wave of the future and knights in armor just slowed everything down.

Gradually they hung up their lances and breastplates to rust in a shed. By the time Cervantes published Don Quixote in 1605 [C.E.], the foolish knight-errant was an affectionate joke from the past. Knights turned into gentlemen.

Gentlemen, being unemployed by definition, needed an emotional outlet, a bit of excitement, and some way to measure themselves against their peers now that tournaments were gone. Besides, as the feudal powers of the landowners shriveled under stronger centralized monarchies, a gentleman needed to shore up his status and prove he still mattered, he was still privileged, he still carried a sword. He stopped jousting for glory and started dueling for honor.

— Gentlemen’s Blood, pp. 21-22

It’s curious, the number of sensible men who steeled themselves to the risk of the duel, came to terms with the possibility of death, hoped to die bravely and well, wrote their wills and a few last letters to their families, said their prayers, and went forth to the meeting, and then were stricken with horror to find themselves still standing and their adversary dead. They’d readied themselves to die but not to kill. The other man lying there bleeding to death caught them by surprise.

— Gentlemen’s Blood, p. 208

As the castle became indispensable to the continuous deepening exercise of power [in the 12th Century C.E.], it also became architecturally more formidable, steadily achieving higher levels of expert design, capable of cowing its countryside, wearing down any besiegers, exalting the castellan and his knights, and serving, much more than did the fortress of a later age, as a political center. Yet even at its strongest, the castle still suffered from the problem of all fixed defenses: once compromised, it became a prison for its own garrison. Its triumph represented a revival of the single inordinately valuable target, like the acropolis of a Greek city-state….

— To Dare and to Conquer, p. 110

To ensure that his brigade and its battalion rearguard were neither enveloped nor routed in withdrawing, [Prussian General] Steinmetz dispatched a fresh infantry and cavalry regiment ahead to Gosselies, thereby observing the sound principle that in rearguard actions the withdrawal of engaged units should be covered by troops already in position.

— Waterloo: New Perspectives, p. 159

…Raising money to pay the cost of war was to cause more damage to 14th century [C.E.] society than the physical destruction of war itself. The governing fact was that medieval organization by this time had passed to a predominantly money economy. Armed forces were no longer primarily feudal levies serving under a vassal’s obligation who went home after forty days; they were recruited bodies who served for pay. The added expense of a paid army raised the cost of war beyond the ordinary means of the sovereign. Without losing its appetite for war, the inchoate state had not yet devised a regular method to pay for it. When he overspent, the sovereign resorted to loans from bankers, towns, and businesses which he might not be able to repay, and to the even more disruptive measures of arbitrary taxation and devaluation of the coinage.

Above all, war was made to pay for itself through pillage. Booty and ransom were not just a bonus, but a necessity to take the place of arrears in pay and to induce enlistment. The taking of prisoners for ransom became a commercial enterprise. Since kings could rarely raise sufficient funds in advance, and collection of taxes was slow, troops in the field were always ahead of their pay. Loot on campaign took the place of the paymaster. Chivalric war, like chivalric love, was, as Michelet said of the whole epoch, double et louche (a provocative phrase which could mean “double and squinting” or “equivocal” or “shady” in the sense of disreputable). The aim was one thing and the practice another. Knights pursued war for glory and practiced it for gain.

— A Distant Mirror, Chapter 4

Emphasis mine.

Protected by plate armor and the pride of chivalry, the noble felt himself invulnerable and invincible and became increasingly contemptuous of the foot soldier. He believed that commoners, being excluded from chivalry, could never be relied upon in war. As grooms, baggage attendants, foragers, and road-builders—the equivalent of engineer corps—they were necessary, but as soldiers in leather jerkins armed with pikes and billhooks, they were considered an encumbrance who in a sharp fight would “melt away like snow in sunshine.” This was not simple snobbism but a reflection of experience in the absence of training. The Middle Ages had no equivalent of the Roman legion. Towns maintained trained bands of municipal police, but they tended to fill up their contingents for national defense with riff-raff good for nothing else. Abbeys had better use for their peasants than to employ their time in military drill. In any epoch the difference between a rabble and an army is training, which was not bestowed on foot soldiers called up by the arrière-ban. Despised as ineffective, they were ineffective because they were despised.

— A Distant Mirror, Chapter 4

Emphasis mine.