The main components of the Western military tradition - freedom, decisive battle, civic militarism, rationalism, vibrant markets, discipline, dissent, and free critique

From Carnage and Culture by Victor Davis Hanson. Page 168.

By 1096 a fragmented western Europe was strong enough to send thousands of soldiers across the sea to the Middle East. In a series of three great Crusades between 1096 and 1189, Europeans occupied Jerusalem and carved out Western enclaves in the heart of Islam. Throughout the Middle Ages it was Europe, not the Middle East, that was more secure from foreign assault. It was impossible for any Muslim army, unlike the Crusaders, to transport large armies by sea to storm the heartland of Europe. Arab armadas had long ago learned in the seventh and eighth centuries at the height of Islamic power that it was unfeasible to take nearby Constantinople.

Such European resiliency offers the proper explanation for the great advance of Western power in the New World, Asia, and Africa after 1500. Europe’s renewed strength against the Other in the age of gunpowder was facilitated by the gold of the New World, the mass employment of firearms, and new designs of military architecture. Yet the proper task of the historian is not simply to chart the course for this amazing upsurge in European influence, but to ask why the “Military Revolution” took place in Europe and not elsewhere. The answer is that throughout the Dark and Middle Ages, European military traditions founded in classical antiquity were kept alive and improved upon in a variety of bloody wars against Islamic armies, Viking raiders, Mongols, and northern barbarian tribes. The main components of the Western military tradition of freedom, decisive battle, civic militarism, rationalism, vibrant markets, discipline, dissent, and free critique were not wiped out by the fall of Rome. Instead, they formed the basis of a succession of Merovingian, Carolingian, French, Italian, Dutch, Swiss, German, English, and Spanish militaries that continued the military tradition of classical antiquity.

Key to this indefatigability was the ancient and medieval emphasis on foot soldiers, and especially the idea of free property owners, rather than slaves or serfs, serving as heavily armed infantrymen. Once firearms came on the scene, Europe far more easily than other cultures was able to convert ranks of spearmen and pikemen to harquebusiers, who fired as they had stabbed — in unison, on command, shoulder-to-shoulder, and in rank. Cortés in Mexico City and the Christians at Lepanto were successful largely because they were not the products of a nomadic horse people, tribal society, or even theocratic autocracy, but drew their heritage from tough foot soldiers of settled small valleys and rural communities — the type of men who formed a veritable wall of ice at Poitiers and so beat Abd ar-Rahman back.