Weapons of Democracy
I’ve always liked the idea of the days of old when knights were bold, but my life seems much better because those days ended. The chivalric military system hardened into a culture of exclusion, with knighthood based on heritage, not merit. The shift reinforced the feudal system in Europe, locking even heroic serfs into their place at the bottom of society. It took knight-beating weaponry to break these boundaries, and thus seed modern democracy. Or so I gathered on a recent trip to the Higgins Armory, a museum in Worcester that displays the collection of armor and medieval weaponry assembled by an early 20th century New England industrialist.
My analysis came from watching one of the Higgins educational programs. The museum has people in period costume show off the weapons and something about how they were used. The presentation we saw walked through the development of the spear, and the emergence of professional soldiers with the discipline to withstand the charge of mounted knights. there is a diorama of the battle of Grandson, credited as the first where pikemen successfully held off mounted and armored knights in battle, in 1476.
But it was the evolution of projectile arms, from longbows to muskets, which really doomed knights. Bullets in particular didn’t respect titles. Armor made its wearers rich targets (some knights wore extravagant armor to signal that they should be captured and ransomed, rather than killed in battle).
Looking at these advances, it seems to me that each advance in weaponry correlates loosely to a shift in political attitudes about 100 to 200 years later (though in places like England, some of the political shift served to actually enforce ideals laid out in 1215 in the Magna Carta). This works best in the case of the musket, early versions of which emerged in the 1500s. As these were refined, armor fell out of use (it could be made bulletproof, but only at great cost). By the time relatively cheap muskets spread, it takes about 100 years to get to the point of revolution in the U.S. and France. None of this was linear, and backsliding certainly occurred. But I found it an interesting parallel.
Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised by the parallel. As the historian William McNeil noted in “The Rise of the West” (1963), Greek ideas of (limited) democracy were driven first by the phalanx, since “hoplites who defended their city on the battlefield could scarcely be excluded from participation in civil affairs.” Later, the rise of the Athenian fleet led to a similar acknowledgment that if you could row in a battle, you could vote in the assembly, opening voting rights to those who did not have property.
As McNeil concludes, “if the phalanx was the basic school of the Greek polis, the fleet was the finishing school for its democratic version; and if the family farm was the economic basis for the limited democracy of the hoplite franchise, the merchant fleet with its necessary complement of workshops, warehouses, and markets provided the economic sinews for radical democracy.”
Of course, we see from history that political economy has broad crashes that last far longer than economic ones. Even today, soldiers fight for autocrats who hold to no sort of ideal, not even failed ones like communism. As Montaigne said, “Man is an object miraculously vain, various and wavering.” So, too, our societies.