Vegetius says that there is no greater villainy than to leave the field where the enemy is present without making contact...In this regard there are two dishonorable aspects. One, that [the commander] is frightened and so is moved by cowardice; the other, that he has little confidence in his men.

...It is good to discuss the best way out of this situation. If it is desirable to depart, as Vegetius teaches, take great care that your men do not know that you are leaving to avoid a battle, but rather spread word secretly among them that it is beter because of some secret trap to cause damage elsewhere and preferable to reach the enemy when he is off guard.

For, as Vegetius says, if your men knew that you were leaving for no particular reason, they would hold it against you and would soon drift away little by little because they would consider that you were afraid to engage in battle.

So wrote Christine de Pizan in her Book of Deeds of Arms and Chivalry, a "mirror for princes" or moral and behavioral guide, for the young dauphin of France around 1410. It's impossible to say whether this was a practiced strategy: this text is a prescriptive source inside a prescriptive source. But that double layer is important.

Christine cites late antique author Vegetius because his De re militari was THE military strategy guide of the later Middle Ages--as Charity Cannon Willard notes, it would be unthinkable for her to discuss military affairs without referencing him. (In fact, one of the reasons we have difficulty knowing what strategies of Vegetius were and weren't used is because chronicle authors and other writers actually shaped their descriptions of battle around Vegetius' text rather than firsthand knowledge of what had really happened--that's how widespread it was among literate politically-minded medieval people). But because his work was so popular already, we can pay special attention to what of it was excerpted--the things that actually drew the late Middle Ages to his text.

In this case, Christine isn't prescribing a military strategy to the young prince so much as a behavioral code, a culture--the appropriate understanding of chivalry. In the warrior-centric noble masculinity of medieval Europe, chivalry meant not turning away from the battle set out before you. There is a time and a place for fighting not to happen, the passage admits, but the only way to make that acceptable in the eyes of other people is to pretend that peace is just another tactic in war.

This preference for war appears frequently in poetry and chronicles: "Once he has started fighting, no noble knight thinks of anything but breaking heads and arms—better a dead man than a live one who is useless," wrote Bertran de Born in the late twelfth century, not long before Garin de Montglane proclaimed that peace in general made knights physically ill.

And moving from literature to actions, the Crusades provide my two favorite examples of peace/not fighting being unacceptable in the medieval value system. Stephen of Blois was one of the leaders of the First Crusade--that would be, of course, the only successful Crusade. He returned to France afterwards...only for both his wife and the pope to yell at him for leaving the battle before it was done. They pretty much drop-kicked him back to the Near East. And in the thirteenth century, Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II pulled off the seemingly impossible. In the wake of European loss after European loss in the Holy Land, he negotiated for a peaceful Latin takeover of Jerusalem! What!

...And for his efforts at a peaceful victory, the pope excommunicated him.

In a lot of ways, though, the Crusades and the vaguely Hundred Years' War context of Christine and Charles VII aren't the typical setting for medieval warfare. Rather than two enemies squaring off in a series of pitched battles, most medieval warfare was endemic raids, brigandry, short-term sieges, and skirmishes by the landed nobility--not for nothing do Reformation scholars speak of the imperial "robber knights." Expanding Latin population density outward and inward through building castles that were used as raid staging posts was so significant that it's been termed the "making of Europe."

What we find here, of course, is that the people engaged in raiding thought it was a grand and quite profitable practice for themselves. Not so much the peasants who lodged protests--or, eventually, the kings and emperors who sought to bring their power-hungry nobles in line beneath royal power. Robber knights in fifteenth-century Germany fought for their right to keep raiding, as in the Löwlerbund revolt, and lost.

And of course, the late Middle Ages saw the rise of the professional soldier, the mercenary--along with entire genres of poetry, song, and legend elevating the martial lifestyle and deeds of Landsknechte in particular. (Much of it written by Landsknechte themselves, including those disabled or disfigured in battle.) The mercenaries, too, should bring to mind the ultimate cynical (or some might say most practical) reason for medieval soldiers to desire fighting. Payment for service might include some money for mercenaries, but the vast majority of benefit came from loot. Which required battle, or at least enforced fear of a battle happening on the enemy's part.

Sure, medieval people had the vision of ultimate peace, at the Second Coming, and prophets warned that the run-up to the end times would be filled with wars and more wars. Additionally, theologians, legal experts, and even military leaders paid a lot of attention to the concept of just war...which could very easily simply mean justifiable war. But however shrilly the Church preached that clergy and churches WERE NOT to be attacked, the general ethos of medieval society promoted "chivalrous" warfare as a pragmatic, this-worldly ideal.

The existence of an ethos, though, must not be allowed to overwhelm the real people at the heart of the story. J. F. Verbrueggen in particular has highlighted the trepidation and even terror at battle evident in some sources--even in sources where showing soldiers' fear would seem to undermine the polemical purpose of the text, as in Latin writers' Crusade-era chronicles. Or in 1102, the French army evaporated overnight when they all got scared by--for real--a thunderstorm.

Additionally, John Blise has a really interesting article where he traces the prevalence of Big Motivational Speeches in chronicle and other accounts of war. Not that these necessarily or even probably represent what was "actually said," of course. But their simple existence suggests they were necessary, and their contours follow similar/overlapping patterns across later medieval texts. They stress the justness of the war in question and the readiness of the men to fight it. They promise God's help, victory, and protection from injury (so apparently that was a fear). They talk about honor and the need to defend home and hearth. .And, oh yeah, they remind the soldiers that with victory comes loot and profit.

So here we see again the ethos that favored (just) war--but it is overlaid with the cultural assumption that people had to be reminded that they were supposed to favor battle, and the reasons why, on the very eve of the fighting.