The
feudal host was hard to mobilise, harder still to keep in the field, and at the
best an unmanageable weapon; a standing army of mercenary soldiers would have called
for taxation heavier and more regular than any ruler dared to demand, or any
people could afford to pay. The wars of the Middle Ages have therefore, with
few exceptions, a stamp of futility and pettiness. Ambitious enterprises were
foredoomed to failure, and powers apparently annihilated by an invading host
recovered strength as soon as it had rolled away. In short, on the European and
on the national stage alike, medieval politics meant the eternal recurrence of
the same problems and disputes, the eternal repetition of the same palliatives
and the same plan of campaign.
It is true that political science made more
progress than the art of war. But substantial reforms of institutions were effected
only in a few exceptional communities - in Sicily under the Normans and Frederic
II, in England under Henry II and Edward I, in France under Philip Augustus and
his successors. Even in these cases the progress usually consists in
elaborating some primitive expedient, in developing some accepted principal to
the logical conclusion. The more audacious innovators, a Montfort, an
Artevelde, a Frederic II, were tripped up and overthrown as soon as they
stepped beyond the circle of conventional ideas. It will therefore suffice for
our present purpose to state in the barest outline the leading events of
international politics, and the chief advances in the theory of government,
which signalised the Middle Ages.
