[Chiang Kai-shek]

http://www.ospreysam...om/knights.html

Knights and Samurai - Brothers in Arms?

by Stephen Turnbull

In my book Men-at-Arms 105: The Mongols I made the comment that, because of the vast extent of the Mongol conquests, the Teutonic Knights of Germany and the samurai of Japan had in fact fought a common enemy, even though it was to be three more centuries before the two martial societies became aware of each other's existence.

This epic first meeting between the cultures that had produced knights and samurai happened in 1543, when a Portuguese ship ran aground off the Japanese island of Tanegashima. The crew were saved, along with a number of arquebuses, the first ever seen in Japan. The arrival of these weapons is commonly regarded as having sparked a military revolution in Japan, and it is interesting to note that by this time Europe was already going through a military revolution of its own, during which the introduction of firearms was an important factor in bringing about the demise of the mounted knight. On opposite sides of the world, and over several centuries, two distinctive military cultures therefore developed with no contact between them until both traditions were nearly over.

The two societies of samurai and knight naturally show many cultural differences, but there are also many fascinating similarities and parallels. Why should this be? Was there something about being an aristocratic warrior that transcended localised culture and led to something universal? Were the ideals of chivalry and bushido really the same, and when the two traditions faced similar challenges from developments in military technology, did the innovations have the same impact and elicit the same response?




The Cult of the Individual Warrior
Some similarities between knights and samurai are apparent from even the most cursory glance. Both were elite, aristocratic warriors who visibly proclaimed their status on the battlefield by the possession and use of a horse, and drew their status from the huge emphasis both societies placed on a warrior's individual prowess. The samurai may have wielded a bow in place of the knight's lance, yet throughout history both groups valued most highly the act of single combat against a worthy opponent, even if this was an ideal that was not often realised. Most samurai would also have responded approvingly to the recommendation in Federico Fregoso's 16th-century work Il Cortegiano, that 'A knight ought to work the matter wisely in separating himself from the multitude, and undertake notable and bold feats which he hath to do, with as little company as he can, and in the sight of noble men.' Even in the new situation of huge armies of disciplined infantry, the aristocratic sentiment seems to have been that the larger your army, the greater your need to stand out from the crowd. For example, when sombre and practical battledress armours became universally adopted in Japanese armies of the late 16th century, so their equally robust and sensible helmets became embellished with all sorts of weird and wonderful crests and adornments, from huge wooden buffalo horns to plumes of peacock feathers, all of which are regularly noted as being worn in the heat of battle.



The Charge of the Takeda samurai at the battle of Nagashino 1575. (© Osprey Publishing Limited, artwork by Howard Gerrard from: Nagashino 1575 (Campaign 69) by Stephen Turnbull)



There is an equivalent tendency towards exaggerated display in the written accounts of the period. Records of individual exploits are as plentiful as in an earlier age, and in Japan the accounts of notable and bold feats 'performed in the sight of noble men' produced as late as the Korean War of 1592-98 would not have disgraced the hyperbole of the war tales of the 14th century such as the Heike Monogatari. With a stunning contempt for the reality of contemporary warfare, personal achievement and single combat are cited and praised, and for every description of a commander carefully marshalling his arquebus squads there are a dozen describing individual prowess. For example, Okochi Hidemoto led a mixed unit into Namwon castle in 1597, but the greatest emphasis in the chronicle is laid on his reaction to having killed a Korean warrior in single combat:

Graciously calling to mind that this day was the fifteenth day of the eighth lunar month, the day dedicated to his tutelary kami [Hachiman] Dai Bosatsu, he put down his bloodstained blade and, pressing together his crimson-stained palms, bowed in veneration towards far off Japan.

In both Europe and Japan the acquisition of individual glory included the personal involvement in battle of a country's leaders, or of its would-be leaders. The exploits of Henry V at Agincourt are well known, and at the battle of Marignano in 1515 the king of France owed his life to the soundness of his armour, as did the young Tokugawa Ieyasu in 1564 when, on returning from the battle of Azukizaka, he stripped off his armour and three bullets fell out of his shirt. In 1576 Oda Nobunaga was wounded in the leg while conducting operations against the Ikko sectarians of Ishiyama Honganji, three years after his great rival Takeda Shingen had been mortally wounded by a bullet fired from the besieged castle of Noda. In 1511 Europe had even witnessed the unique sight of an armoured Pope, when Julius II fought his anti-French campaign, and a Venetian ambassador in 1598 commented on the exploits of King Henri IV of France in terms that would have done credit to any contemporary daimyö (the equivalent of feudal lords): 'When it comes to making war ... which is the real calling of a great captain and King ... he moves freely under arquebus and cannon fire without giving it a thought and as gaily as if he were going to a wedding, and he often takes greater risks than he should.'

In Japanese warfare the most prestigious individual exploit of all was the accolade of being the first into battle. At the second battle of Uji in 1184 two samurai vied for the honour of being the first to swim his horse across the river and into action, which one won by telling the other that his saddle girth was loose. In 1592 Hosokawa Sadaoki threatened to decapitate any foot soldier who dared to join him and thus overload the bamboo scaling ladder he had placed against the wall of Chinju castle. In 1600 the attack on Gifu castle was delayed while two commanders argued over who should lead the vanguard, a matter that was finally resolved by one agreeing to attack the front gate while the other assaulted the rear. So desperate was the rivalry that on occasions the standard bearers would throw their banners into a castle ahead of the attacking troops.



The Impact of Firearms
Improvements in military technology from the 1500s onwards produced immense challenges in both cultures, and forced both knight and samurai to make a response. In most cases the response was positive, in vivid contrast to the popular view which states that the demise of the European knight may be blamed almost totally on the invention of firearms. After all, does not Don Quixote lament, 'Those diabolical engines, the artillery, whose inventor I firmly believe is now receiving the reward for his devilish invention in hell; an invention which allows a base and cowardly hand to take the life of a brave knight.' Fiction aside, Blaise de Montluc, who was wounded in the face by an arquebus ball in 1562, expressed identical sentiments when he wrote of many valiant men 'being slain for the most part by the most pitiful fellows, and the greatest cowards.'


English Knights cross the Somme via the Blanchetaque ford on their way to the battle of Crécy 1346. (© Osprey Publishing Limited, artwork by Graham Turner from Crécy 1346 (Campaign 71) by David Nicolle)



It may however be argued that the knight was obsolete long before the introduction of gunpowder, the English longbowmen at Crécy having shown how vulnerable he was to a missile attack from massed ranks of lower class troops. But anachronistic or not, the knight took three centuries to die from his obsolescence, because improvements in plate armour gave renewed protection against arrows until challenged afresh by the arquebus. In Japan, however, instead of facing massed ranks of archers, the Japanese samurai were the archers, and spent many hours practising the discharge of bow from a horse's back, skills that survive today in the traditional martial art of yabusame. The foot soldiers usually carried only naginata (glaives), and it is not until the mid-15th century, when armies were swelled by casual recruitment, that we read of foot soldiers acting as missile troops.

The result of these different traditions was that the battle of Cerignola in 1503, where volleys of European arquebuses pierced knightly armour for the first time, was effectively a repeat of the Crécy and Agincourt experience using stronger weapons of offence and defence. However, the battle of Nagashino in 1575, which was Japan's Cerignola, was far more of a radical change because mounted samurai had never had to contend with any sort of missile volleys. François de la Noue, an experienced Huguenot commander, wrote in 1598 that 'Arquebusiers, shooting within twenty paces just in the face of the horse, in my opinion will maim the whole first ranks of the squadron', a remark that could almost be a comment on Nagashino, where Nobunaga's 3,000 arquebusiers did precisely that to the mounted Takeda samurai.

Nevertheless, the arquebus had considerable drawbacks. A slow rate of fire, a certain inaccuracy and a woeful inability to work at all when rain soaked its smouldering match begged the question why such a weapon should have supplanted the longbowman, who could launch fifteen arrows a minute. Yet all these handicaps could be overcome through training and the development of organised volley firing, a technique that was first used in Japan by Oda Nobunaga in 1554 at the battle of Muraki. This was an attack on a castle, where Nobunaga used relays of arquebusiers firing from the edge of the moat, producing similar effects to those that prompted the comments of the Englishman Robert Barret, who noted a 'vollie of musket or hargebuze goeth with more terrour, fury and execution, then doth your vollie of arrows'.

The volley firing at Nagashino also illustrated the need to progress from a form of warfare that emphasised individual fighting to one that involved group actions and cooperation between arms. This alone was a challenge to the pride of a knight or a samurai who had been steeped in an elite and individualistic tradition. However, both societies met the challenge. At Agincourt the English knights and archers realised that they had to work together to secure the victory, just as when, a century later, it became apparent that arquebusiers were very vulnerable to attack from unbroken cavalry if they stood alone. At Riberac (1568) a tight unit of arquebusiers were scattered by a charge of knights after they had fired, and four years later in Japan a devastating mounted assault by the Takeda samurai performed a similar feat at Mikata ga hara. The solution to the problem in Europe was to combine the arquebusiers in some way with that other great innovation, the hedge of pikes. The Swiss are associated particularly with the perfecting of tactics involving this otherwise clumsy weapon, with which they won a series of victories until being overcome themselves at Marignano in 1515. This defeat, however, merely acted as a spur towards the combination of the two arms. As Matthew Sutcliffe put it in 1593, 'The charge of horsemen against shot ... is mortall if they be not either garded with pikes, or have the vantage of ditches, or hedges, or woods, where they cannot reach them.'

It is therefore not surprising to find both solutions of polearms and field fortifications reflected in the Japanese experience. The famous fences of Nagashino that protected the ashigaru arquebusiers were only half the story. Standing beside them were hundreds of other foot soldiers armed with 5.6 metre long nagae-yari, pikes in all but name. Waiting behind them were the samurai, ready to go in with spear and sword, and willing to defer their moment of individual glory until the moment was right in this classic illustration of the combination of arms.



Cannon and Castles
The experience of the two military revolutions diverges somewhat with the development of gunpowder weapons of a larger size. The psychological shock of cannon fire against a densely packed arquebus and pike phalanx was almost as devastating as were its physical effects. A single cannon ball could take out more than twenty men, and at the battle of Ravenna in 1512 one shot is alleged to have killed thirty armoured knights. At the battle of Fornovo in 1495 the Swiss packed 3,000 men into a 60 metre square. At Bicocca in 1522 their formation consisted of several rectangles each containing 7,500 men standing side by side, so a cannon ball could hardly miss, but the samurai were spared such torment. Field artillery was never developed as a specialist arm, and in any case the typical Japanese field formation was a much looser arrangement from which defence could be quickly converted into lively offence. The way in which a Swiss pike square could make its steady and crushing advance while keeping formation also bears little resemblance to a typical Japanese army's advance, where the word 'charge' is the most frequently used verb in contemporary battle descriptions.


A further common aspect of the two military revolutions was the development of fortifications. In the popular view the heavy cannon of Europe merely blasted the medieval walls into redundancy. The fall of Constantinople to Turkish heavy artillery in 1453 sent shockwaves round Christian Europe, and the Reconquista of the Spanish kingdom of Granada was to a large extent an artillery war, the siege of Malaga in 1487 being the last recorded occasion in Europe of the use of trebuchets. Old-style castles were very vulnerable to gunfire because the high and thin walls of medieval fortresses had been built in this way as a protection against scaling ladders and siege towers. The fortress revolution involved the use of artillery and the building of lower, thicker walls, which were not always of stone: fortifications of earth, which absorbed the cannon shot, could be built at a fraction of the cost. Cannon were also found to be as useful for defending castles as they were for attacking them, hence the evelopment of artillery walls and gun emplacements. The result was the emergence of what is known as the trace italienne, a complex, low-walled fortress characterised not by tall towers and curtain walls but by triangular artillery bastions located behind wide ditches.

The Japanese parallels are very interesting. The earlier yamashiro style of castle, whereby a hill was stripped of its forest cover and then literally carved up into a series of horizontal baileys, each allowing a clear field of defensive fire, took on a more formidable aspect with the construction on the surfaces of these slopes of the huge stone walls that are such a feature of Japanese castle design. Having little to fear from long-range artillery, these fortresses were designed to repel assault and allow counter-attack, but their squat, angular walls and deep ditches bear a strong resemblance to contemporary European designs. In both cases these fortresses provided a barracks and a refuge for large armies commanded by members of the knightly class.

In conclusion, the introduction of firearms did not automatically bring about the abolition of either knights or samurai. Instead both knights and samurai adapted to the changed circumstances, and used the military innovations for their own benefits in the achievement of victory and personal glory. Why else is it that on the bas-relief on the wall of the palace of Charles V in Granada there is the depiction of a mounted knight in full armour accompanied by a cannon? Artillery even had its own patron saint, Saint Barbara. If the way to fight was by using volleys of arquebusiers then their leaders would enthusiastically embrace the technique, if for no other reason than that the result of their endeavours would be to lay an enemy open to the glorious samurai spears or the noble knightly lance. Even the horse, that quintessential badge of both knight and samurai, could be temporarily discarded, because if conditions dictated that mounted warfare was inappropriate then both knight and samurai would dismount, and again saw no disgrace in it. The English knights dismounted at Agincourt, as did the Japanese samurai at Tennoji in 1615. Young noblemen of Venice often served on fighting galleys, and during the Granada Wars Spain's 'Great Captain', Gonzalo de Cordoba, donned an infantryman's helmet and led attacks on Moorish forts, gaining great glory the while. Anything could be adapted, adopted and improved, particularly if it enhanced the warrior's individual stature and preserved the aristocratic status quo.

The Fate of the Vanquished
Greater differences between knights and samurai arise when we turn from the technology of the military revolution to its more personal expression. Medieval Europe espoused the great tradition of ransom, and the high prices that could be asked for a captured nobleman made the wholesale slaughter of knights an economic nonsense. When the King of France was captured at Poitiers in 1356 he was almost crushed to death in the scrum of Englishmen eager to claim him as a prize, and his eventual redemption almost bankrupted his kingdom. Yet by the beginning of the 16th century this tradition was beginning to fade. The mass and often anonymous slaughter by arquebus and cannon made the capture of a particularly valuable individual a difficult matter. Prisoners of high rank also tended to be claimed by the government rather than his actual captor, so the rewards were much less when filtered down through the hierarchy. With such incentives gone, savagery could flourish, and when the Swiss castle of Grandson was tricked into surrendering to the Burgundians in 1476 the entire garrison were either drowned in the lake or hanged from the walnut trees on its shore. When the Swiss took their revenge no quarter was either asked or expected. The Burgundian garrison of the recaptured Grandson were all flung to their deaths from the battlements except for one nobleman who pleaded that he was worth trying to ransom.

Ransom for money was unknown in Japan, and the closest parallel to it was the practice of hostage taking, although warriors defeated on a battlefield were rarely taken captive. Instead the hostages were usually members of a lord's family, whose throats could be cut at the least sign of resistance, and peace was frequently concluded by an exchange of family prisoners. With the establishment of the Tokugawa Shogunate something resembling a national hostage scheme was set up when the daimyôs' families were required to reside in the Shogun's capital as a guarantee of good behaviour.

When battles occurred in Japan the samurai collected heads rather than living bodies, severed heads being the time-honoured proof of duty done and the finest invoice for payment to present to one's lord. Yet here too the Sengoku Jidai (the 'Age of War', i.e. the 16th century) saw changes. Instead of beheading the defeated the Japanese began to recycle them. The hoary myth of a samurai's undying and unflinching loyalty to his lord, which had a basis in solid fact, ran into difficulties when that lord was either defeated or dead, or both. Contrary to the popular view, samurai warfare rarely ended with acts of either mass slaughter or mass seppuku (suicide). Defeated daimyô were often encouraged to surrender their territories for the guarantee of having their original holdings returned to them in exchange for a pledge of allegiance. A good example is the process by which Takeda Shingen expanded his domains. Rivals such as the Sanada of Shinano were first defeated then absorbed, and their leaders took their places among the Takeda 'Twenty-Four Generals', Shingen's most trusted retainers. When the Takeda were defeated in their turn in 1582, many of their number passed over into the service of the victorious Tokugawa.

There were, however, many times in Japanese warfare when the demands of personal glory or the need for security made the absorption of an enemy impractical, and in these conditions head collecting still continued with undiminished fervour. A good example is found in the account of the taking of the Korean castle of Namwon in 1597 by Okochi Hidemoto. After scaling the walls the Japanese assault party were faced with a counter-attack from mounted men, yet even in all this confusion and danger personal achievement was all important, in particular over the samurai obsession with taking one's opponent's head:

Using his two shaku one sun blade Okochi cut at the right groin of the enemy on horseback and he tumbled down. As his groin was excruciatingly painful from this one assault the enemy fell off on the left hand side. There were some samurai standing nearby and three of them struck at the mounted enemy to take his head. Four men had now cut him down, but as his plan of attack had been that the abdominal cut would make him fall off on the left, Okochi came running round so that he would not be deprived of his head.

Okochi Hidemoto' s master, Ota Kazuyoshi, is also honoured as follows during the siege of Ulsan in 1598:

Afterwards they performed the head inspection ceremony for the men's eleven meritorious heads. Kato Kiyomasa's men had taken one head. Asano Nagayoshi's men had taken one head, but Ota Kazuyoshi's men had taken a total of nine heads. Everyone inside the castle noticed this and praised him, saying, 'While Kiyomasa owns half of Higo province, and Nagayoshi owns the whole province of Kai, they only took one head each, yet Kazuyoshi is a person of low degree and has taken nine heads. Indeed, he conducts himself as a fine, brave samurai.'

Yet even the practice of head collection is not without its parallels in Europe. The Venetians employed Albanian light cavalrymen, called stradiots, as mercenaries and paid them one ducat for every enemy head they brought back. At the battle of Fornovo in 1495 one stradiot, despairing of being able to find a French head for his reward cut off instead the head of a local priest and claimed it as a warrior's.



The Treatment of Civilians
In all ages war has brought death and destruction to those unfortunate enough to be caught up in its wake. The Black Prince's chevauchée raids caused terror in 14th century France. In 1544 the Earl of Surrey said to Henry VIII that 'Edinburgh had been well burnt', and in Ireland in 1593 Sir Arthur Chichester recorded the following about a raid along Lough Neagh: 'We have killed above one hundred people of all sorts, besides such as were burnt, how many I know not. We spare none of what quality or sex soever, and it has bred much terror in the people, who heard not a drum nor saw not a fire there for a long time.'

The depredations sometimes inflicted upon the inhabitants of a defeated or surrendered town could be much worse. The sack of Antwerp by the Spanish in 1576 was an orgy of rape and plunder which led to the loss of 7,000 lives, and when Maastricht fell in 1579 one-third of the city's women and children were slaughtered on the spot or died from the brutalities inflicted upon them.

A comparison with Japan, however, throws up a very different claim with respect to the samurai tradition. This belief states that because nearly all their wars were civil wars, then not only were the samurai no worse than their European counterparts, they were actually much better. As the oppressed peasant could easily cross a provincial border to till the fields of an enemy, so the argument goes, there was no cruelty against civilians. The samurai, therefore, were immune from the tendency to random violence and economic devastation inherent in contemporary Europe. This is a considerable claim to make, and in support of this view it must be admitted that the most dramatic example of a peasant uprising against a cruel daimyô occurred two decades after the civil wars had ceased. This was the Shimabara Rebellion of 1637 to 1638, directed against the tyrant Matsukura Shigemasa, who was given to tying peasants inside straw raincoats and setting fire to them. From this it may be argued that if Matsukura had lived at a time when one's neighbour was by definition one's rival then self-interest alone would have prevented him from acting in such an outrageous manner. The behaviour of Japanese forces abroad during the 20th century is then seen as an aberration of the samurai tradition, and not in any way as its consequence.

It is indeed difficult to tease out much evidence of deliberate civilian casualties from contemporary Japanese writings, though this may simply be that the compilers did not think that such matters were worth recording. In the early war tales we read of civilian houses being set on fire as an act of war by the ruthless rebel Taira Masakado, and similar acts occur during the Gempei Wars, but these incidents tend to be portrayed as the actions of a maverick. When Takeda Shingen was repulsed before Odawara castle in 1569, he burned the town of Odawara before retiring, but when Toyotomi Hideyoshi took Kagoshima in 1587 and Odawara in 1590 there was nothing that remotely resembled the sack of a European town. By contrast, civilian deaths are implied in the accounts of wars conducted against peasant armies, such as Nobunaga's campaign against the Ikkô sectarians or the Shimabara Rebellion, where the distinction between soldier and non-combatant was blurred and the rebels took shelter in fortresses along with their families. The fall of Osaka castle in 1615, where the castle walls surrounded a city, inevitably led to many civilian deaths.

However, the Korean campaign added a different dimension. Here the fortified town often replaced the isolated castle as a battle site, and many civilian deaths must be inferred from the huge number of heads taken at such conflicts as Chinju and Namwon. But the most powerful evidence comes in the form of a unique and little known document. We noted above how Ota Kazuyoshi had taken along with him to Korea the chronicler Okochi Hidemoto. Ota Kazuyoshi, however, was accompanied not by one chronicler, but by two, because he had also taken along as personal physician and chaplain a Buddhist monk called Keinen. Keinen kept a diary in which he recorded his observations and emotions about the human suffering inflicted on the Korean population. So critical was Keinen that the diary remained unpublished in Japan until 1965.

Keinen's diary entries covering the fall of Namwon castle in 1597 make very different reading when compared to Okochi's account of the same siege. When the castle fell he left the town and saw dead bodies lying near the road like grains of sand. 'My emotions were such that I could not even glance at them.' As he walked further on he found more bodies in nearby houses, 'and this went on into the fields and mountains'. The bodies were of innocent men, women and children. To the samurai chronicler of the Wakizaka family, however, the slaughter was just a further stage of the military operation:

From early dawn of the following morning we gave chase and hunted them in the mountains and scoured the villages for the distance of one day's travel. When cornered, we made a wholesale slaughter of them. During a period of ten days we seized 10,000 of the enemy, but we did not cut off their heads. We cut off their noses, which told us how many heads there were. By this time [Wakizaka] Yasuharu's total of heads was over 2,000.


Herzog Hans zu Sachsen, a 16th century knight about to enter the lists to partake in the German 'Gestech', a variant of jousting. (© Copyright Osprey Publishing Limited, artwork by Angus McBride from Knights at Tournament (Elite 17) by Christopher Gravett)



The collection of noses in lieu of heads was to become a horrid characteristic of the second Korean invasion of 1597–98. The Japanese dictator Toyotomi Hideyoshi, who was growing increasingly insane, insisted upon proof of his soldiers' loyalty and achievements like the reward-giving generals of the ancient civil wars, but the process was hampered by the logistical problems of shipping heads. Hideyoshi therefore began to receive a steady stream of noses, the ghastly trophies being pickled in salt and packed into wooden barrels. Each one was meticulously enumerated and recorded by the yokome-shû (inspectors unit) before leaving Korea. In Japan they were suitably interred in a mound near Hideyoshi's Great Buddha, and there they remain to this day inside Kyoto's least mentioned and most often avoided tourist attraction, the grassy burial mound that bears the erroneous name of Mimizuka, the 'Mound of Ears'.

In spite of there being several references in the diaries of the Korean Admiral Yi Sun-sin to the practice of sending severed Japanese ears to the Korean Court, the practice from the Korean side was confined to soldiers on the battlefield. Keinen's diary, and several other samurai chronicles, confirms that the Japanese carried out the practice on non-combatants. The chronicle of a certain Motoyama contains the stark and unambiguous statement that men and women, down to the newborn infants, everyone was wiped out, no one was left alive.

It is also strange to read in Keinen's diary his evidence of the cruel treatment meted out by the samurai to the Japanese labourers press-ganged into the invading army to complete the building of Ulsan castle. They were forced to work alongside Korean captives and treated equally badly. Their fate stirred Keinen to pity. While recognising that everyone in the Japanese army was involved in the desperate construction programme 'from those who are in the arquebus squads or who wear horô (i.e. the samurai), down to the boatmen and the labourers', Keinen noticed a very different attitude being shown to those who were soldiers and those who were not. 'To prevent carelessness heads are cut off,' he writes, 'but blame is not shared, and to the sorrow of the peasants it is their heads that they cut off and stick up at the crossroads.' In the intense pressure to have the walls of Ulsan finished before the Chinese army arrived, the labourers were clearly regarded as expendable, and were worked until they dropped. The astonishing thing is that these peasants would be expected to till the lands of these same samurai overlords when they returned to Japan. But in the unreal atmosphere of the Korean campaign there was no thought for the future other than the immediate short-term goal of completing the defences. 'With no distinction being made between day and night,' writes Keinen, 'men are made to exceed their personal limits. There are beatings for the slightest mistake in performing a task such as tying knots. In many cases I have witnessed, this is the last ever occasion on which the person gets into trouble,' and in his diary entry for 23 December he makes one of his most despairing statements of all: 'I am fearful of these things. Hell cannot be in any other place except here.'

Such observations remind us that both the samurai tradition and the knightly tradition had a very dark side. It may well not have been evident at home, but it was certainly the prevailing image abroad to those who were its victims. Thanks to Keinen, we now know that the samurai may have been no worse than their European counterparts, but they were certainly no better.



Chivalry and Bushido
Being faced with such horrors on a daily basis, and with the ever present likelihood of one's own death, it would be foolish to think of either breed of military aristocrats as blind to the reality of their calling. As well as glorifying the individual warrior, Froissart's Chroniques and Heike Monogatari also performed a similar function in making the practice of war into something noble, as both societies responded to the realities of their profession by a similar mixture of group solidarity, nostalgia and snobbery. In Europe it was called chivalry. In Japan in the early years of the Edo Period it was to be called bushido, but the foundations were there centuries before in the loyalty and bravery that tradition demanded from the lowliest samurai. The code itself may have been unwritten, but the exploits of one's ancestors provided sufficient case studies for its precepts to be thoroughly understood, even if they could not always be realised.

It is very tempting to look back from our modern world and see the cults of chivalry and bushido as ways of coping with the horrors of war, or even of assuaging guilt by sanitising its profession on pages where civilians never appear. To counter this view it has to be noted that the contemporary world did not feel the need for this, because the samurai appear to have had no guilty feelings whatsoever about what they did, including the massacres in Korea. In Yoshino Jingoza'emon's account of the fall of Pusan in 1592, Japan's first victory of the war, he writes of an orgy of slaughter during which the frenzied samurai even cut the heads off dogs and cats. But it is all reported in a very matter of fact way. One is driven to the conclusion that if there was any 'reality of war' from which the chroniclers felt a need to shield their readers, then it was no more than the reality that wars were actually fought between anonymous groups of vulgar soldiers in an obscuring fog of cannon smoke, a concept that may indeed have held real terror for the proud individual samurai.

The greatest element of unreality that appears in the chronicles of bushido and chivalry is that romanticised descriptions of battles had the effect of promoting an ideal of warfare that rarely existed. Studies have shown that both the Chroniques of Froissart and the battle sections in Heike Monogatari, which were both written at about the same time, were not eyewitness accounts but an expression of 'how warfare should have been' to an author looking back through rose-tinted spectacles. The exploits of Minamoto Yoshitsune in Heike Monogatari, and Kusunoki Masashige in Taiheiki, therefore set impossible and largely fictionalised standards of conduct to which later generations might aspire. For example, the early Konjaku Monogatari reminds its readers that 'To overcome timidity, you must forget entirely about yourself and your wife and children.' This theme crops up later in the Heike Monogatari, which says, 'In battle, even though a parent or child is struck and killed, the eastern warrior rides over the body and keeps on fighting.' The same sentiment is then repeated almost word for word in the Taiheiki, where it states that, 'although lords and vassals were killed, they paid no heed to the number but rode over the bodies,' a good example of an idealised tradition growing with every repetition.

The result was that although Japanese battles in the Warring States Period were won through a skilful if unglamorous combination of samurai, foot soldiers and artillery, it was nostalgia and an appeal to precedent that still ruled supreme in the samurai mind. Thus it was that the capture of Ch'ungju, a particularly bloody struggle in Korea, was compared romantically to the battle of Ichi no tani in 1184, and the decision whether to attack at the battle of Chiksan in 1597 took into account the similarity of its situation to Nagashino. Even ancient Chinese chronicles were pressed into service for providing glorious examples and parallels from the past. Heike Monogatari has many passages describing such idealised warfare, where hostilities begin with chivalric challenges to single combat, and all fights are conducted cleanly, nobly and with enthusiasm.

Yet in both cultures these idealised examples of battlefield behaviour sometimes needed a little extra help. At the battle of Mauron in 1352, according to Baker's Chronicle, the French 'set up their position with a steep mountain slope behind them so that they could not fly. Their purpose was to increase their zeal for fighting by knowledge of the impossibility of flight.' At the siege of Chokoji in 1570 Shibata Katsuie deliberately smashed all the water storage jars before leading his men in a desperate sally out of the castle that succeeded in driving the enemy away.

This was the harsh historical reality of warfare, as was the widespread recognition that a surprise night attack, often to the accompaniment of burning buildings and mobs of foot soldiers, provided a better guarantee of victory than an openly declared challenge. When Minamoto Yoriyoshi burns Kuriyagawa, the chronicler Mutsu Waki has him exclaim, 'Let a mighty wind repay the loyalty of an old minister. Send the wind! Kindle the flames!' The European experience was very similar, and Denifle, the French historian of the Hundred Years War, wrote that 'fire was the constant ally of the English'. So frequent are the references to the use of fire as a weapon in Japan that many a samurai could have expressed in terms of their own culture the sentiments of the Margrave of Brandenburg, who wrote that fire 'gave glory to war in the same way that the Magnificat illuminated Vespers'.

One major difference between chivalry and bushido is the total absence of courtly love from the Japanese version. The European knight, fighting with his lady's sleeve affixed to his helmet and dashing off a quick sonnet when there was a lull in the fighting, has no samurai equivalent. In the Gikeiki, a life of Minamoto Yoshitsune, there is a scene where the hero seduces a young woman, but his underlying motive is the acquisition of a Chinese military scroll possessed by her father! When women appear in the accounts of samurai heroism it is usually in a self-immolating role as they commit suicide when a castle falls, such as the wife of the keeper of Sakasai castle who lifted the castle's bronze bell on to her shoulders and drowned herself in the moat.

However, a factor common to both codes was the emphasis placed on a willingness to die for one's lord or for the cause. In Japan the ultimate expression of this was the committing of seppuku, otherwise known as hara kiri, the act of ritual suicide that was admired by friend and foe alike. In Europe the rare mentions of suicide after a battle are invariably the result of panic and terror, and are never seen as a noble deed. In 1333 many Scots drowned themselves in the sea after their defeat at Halidon Hill, because they anticipated correctly what would be the fate of any captives. Samurai killed themselves to avoid the disgrace of capture or to make amends for an error. But no European knight could have understood the attitude of Yamamoto Kansuke, who killed himself at the battle of Kawanakajima in 1461. When he perceived that his battle plan had gone disastrously wrong, he took responsibility for the failure in this most dramatic fashion. Suicide also offered a way to follow one's lord in death. The account of Ulsan in Taikoki tells of a certain Reizei Motomitsu, who, 'wielded his naginata [glaive] like a water wheel, slaying fifteen or sixteen of the nearby enemy', before being cut down, to the great distress of his followers.

Because Shiromatsu Zen'emonnojo, Igazaki Matabeinojo and Yoshida Tarobei were by chance somewhere else, they regretted that they had not been there with him to be killed in battle. So when they took possession of Motomitsu's corpse they performed the ritual cutting open their bellies in the shape of a cross on that very spot.

The greatest similarity between chivalry and bushido lies in the area of self-belief, because the mere existence of warriors' codes reinforced their perception of themselves as an elite. When Kato Kiyomasa attacked the Jurchens of Manchuria in 1592 his sole motivation was 'to show the savages the mettle of the Japanese'. In reporting the siege of Namwon, Okochi Hidemoto refers to foot soldiers as 'our inferiors', and when Lord Rivers, a veteran of the battle of Bosworth, went to Spain to assist in the Reconquista, a Spanish author could comment about the English knights that, 'Though from a remote and somewhat barbarous island, yet they believed themselves to be the most perfect men on earth.'


Senior English Knights of the latter stages of the Hundred Years War. (© Osprey Publishing Limited, artwork by Graham Turner from Henry V and the Conquest of France 1416–53 (Men-at-Arms 317) by Paul Knight)





From Knight to Cavalryman
So what of the ultimate fate of our two archetypal figures, the knight and the samurai? The developments that made up the two 16th century military revolutions changed the nature of warfare in both societies, but in neither case did they lead to the abolition of their aristocratic military class. Instead of disappearing in the quixotic smoke of gunpowder both knight and samurai survived and prospered, and instead of being overcome by a military revolution, each joined in with enthusiasm in a military evolution. The only caveat placed on this development was that the innovations should be controlled in such a way as to leave the aristocratic and leadership aspects of their calling very much intact. It was only when this was no longer possible in reality, and heroic chronicles could no longer sustain it even in fiction, that the knightly role declined, and it is in the knightly decline, as the 16th century passed into the 17th, that we find the widest variation between the two military cultures of Europe and Japan. The triumph of the Tokugawa family at the battle of Sekigahara in 1600 eventually led to over two centuries of peace, but it was peace enforced by a totalitarian regime that closed its doors to European contact from 1639 onwards. This meant that the knight and the samurai would once again tread separate paths of development.

In Europe the innovations of the military revolution continued to be expanded by men such as Gustavus Adolphus and Oliver Cromwell, and over the next century knights became transformed into cavalry. In this complex process the lance and the mace gave way to the pistol and the sword, but even if the knight discarded his armour, he lost little of his elite status. The aristocratic cavalry officer in his unspeakable finery was the direct heir of the medieval ideal, and the Charge of the Light Brigade at Balaklava illustrates a particular aspect of arrogant knightly behaviour that would not have been out of place, nor any more sensible, at the battles of either Crécy or Nagashino.



From Samurai to Swordsman
In Japan things were somewhat different, because, in vivid contrast to the turmoil of Europe's Thirty Years War, the 'Pax Tokugawa' made Japan look back with nostalgia on an idealised samurai past, which a combination of politics and popular culture then began to transform into an equally idealistic samurai present. With no battles to fight the impetus of Japan's military revolution was quickly lost, and the Shimabara Rebellion, when a peasant army held out against the Shogun's forces, was a portent of a long, slow decline. Military technology continued to develop, but, shorn of purpose, it was a form of progress that was constantly looking over its shoulder with increased nostalgia. The result was the growth of a samurai tradition that became more and more separated from the actual practice of warfare, and the handling of large, well-disciplined armies was forgotten in a bizarre development of the cult of the individual warrior. While the European knight became the practical, modern, yet still aristocratic cavalryman, the mounted samurai warrior became transformed into the samurai swordsman, of which the most important feature was the way in which the hitherto little-regarded Japanese sword acquired a new life of its own as the classic samurai fetish.

The above remark requires some clarification, because, although Japanese craftsmen were producing the world's most technically perfect swords from the 12th century onwards, prowess in a warrior had been measured by his skill at mounted archery, not by his reputation as a swordsman. The earliest expression equivalent to bushido is 'The Way of Horse and Bow', never 'The Way of the Sword', and most instances of single combat in Heike Monogatari are settled with a dagger rather than a sword. Even in the 16th century it was the spear, wielded from horseback or on foot, that was the samurai's primary weapon, not the sword. At one stage the arquebus almost became the samurai's weapon of choice, and there exists an impassioned letter from Asano Nagayoshi pleading that all troops coming to join him in the Korean campaign, including samurai, should be armed with guns. However, as we have seen, the revelation of the power of the arquebus when used for volley firing worked against this trend, and, because the wheel-lock pistol was developed in Japan after wars had ceased, the caracole of pistol-armed cavalry with which Europe became familiar was never seen on a Japanese battlefield.

The long years of peace therefore ensured that into the place of a samurai tradition that had once taken pride in the skilful use of group fighting stepped the figure of the lone swordsman, and the sword, the 'soul of the samurai', began to reign supreme. It was both weapon and symbol, forged as a religious act and wielded with superhuman skill in a way that the battles of the Sengoku Jidai, with their firearms and hedges of spearmen, seldom witnessed. None the less it became a theme so dominant that one author, unaware of the tremendous arsenal possessed by the Tokugawa Shoguns, could actually write of Japan 'giving up the gun'.

Japan may not actually have given up the gun, but circumstances meant that she had given up using it, and the nostalgia for an idealised and largely mythical samurai past, where individual swordsmen fought each other on battlefields, became transformed into an equally idealised samurai present. On many occasions the myths of the past fed into a brutal everyday reality, because the absence of battles to fight had resulted in a large number of unemployed samurai. Some were engaged as teachers of martial arts, some became Zen monks, but enough individual swordsmen, made desperate by boredom, avarice or poverty, ended up fighting each other at crossroads to ensure a steady supply of plots for the Japanese theatre. The re-enactment of such activities on the stage then ensured that a formerly exclusive and aristocratic samurai tradition entered popular Japanese culture as well, and was transmitted through kabuki plays, ukiyoe prints and on into the films of Akira Kurosawa, whose Seven Samurai is for many people all we know on earth of the samurai tradition, and all we need to know.

By this time the knight and the samurai had long since gone their separate ways. These brothers in arms had for centuries developed similarly yet apart as aristocratic elites. They had then come together for a brief century when they faced similar challenges from new technology and responded in similar ways, only to part company dramatically, each to develop its own culture and sustain its own myths, which grew steadily more glorious with every year that passed.

[Chiang Kai-shek]

http://www.thehaca.c...ys/knightvs.htm

The Medieval European Knight vs.
The Feudal Japanese Samurai?

By J. Clements
ARMA Director

From time to time it is interesting to ponder the outcome of an encounter between two of histories most formidable and highly skilled warriors: the Medieval European knight and the feudal Japanese samurai. The thought of “who would win” in an actual fight between these martial experts of such dissimilar methods is intriguing. Who would emerge victorious or who was historically the better fighter is a question occasionally raised, but it is really a moot question. In the case of comparing a knight to a samurai, each warrior used armor, weapons, and methods oriented towards the particular opponents of their day and age. Therefore, neither can be looked upon as being universally more effective under all conditions against all manner of opponents. In one sense, it is like asking who are better soldiers, jungle fighters or ski troops? It depends upon the situation and the environment. Still, it’s an interesting encounter to consider. Having some small experience in the methods and weaponry of each, as well as a few cross-training opportunities, I offer my humble thoughts on the matter.

The Scenario

First of all, we must ask where is it these two lone warriors would meet? Under what circumstances? Since the conditions of this imaginary fight could play a major factor, it can be proposed that such an encounter would best take place on a flat, firm, open field with no cover and plenty of room to maneuver. Though each is an accomplished horseman, it would also be conducive to have the single-combat duel occur dismounted, alone, on foot and without use of missile weapons. Interestingly, the same climate and weather for each would be just about right.

There are a great many intangibles to consider here. The ability of each combatant to read or size up their opponent and the threat they posed would be an important consideration. Are both to be briefed on the nature of their opponent and his armaments? Or will the encounter be a blind one in which neither knows anything about their adversary? We might want to just assume that each of our ideal combatants has been informed to some degree regarding the other and therefore mentally prepared and composed.

Of course, if we are supposing a clash between two “typical warriors”, we must also ask exactly what will be considered typical? The knights of circa 1100 and the samurai of circa 1200 were roughly evenly matched in equipment. But the same comparative warriors during the 1400’s for instance, were quite dissimilar. Each of the two historical warriors in question did fight with equivalent technologies, under fairly similar climates and terrain, and for similar reasons. But it’s difficult to think in terms of a “generic” Medieval knight or a “standard” samurai warrior. With respect to a European knight, it’s not easy to choose what nationality, and what type of warrior from which portion of the overall Middle Ages. With the samurai though, we are dealing with a single, homogenous culture and one in which versions of their historical martial traditions have survived, in one form or another, fairly intact. Thus we have a somewhat better idea of the average samurai’s training and ability through the centuries than compared to contemporary European warriors. Then again, it's sometimes argued that today's version of modern civilian budo ("war ways") is not equivalent to the historical military bujutsu ("war skills") of the samurai. At the same time, while we may not have an extant tradition of knightly martial arts any longer, we however do have volumes of actual training manuals from the era describing in technical detail for us just what their skills and methods at the time were all about.

As for the knight, are we assuming he will be a maile clad Norman with sword and kite shield from the year 1066? An English or French chevalier of 1350 in partial plate with arming sword ready for duel in the champ clos? Will he be an Italian condottieri from 1450 resplendent in full regalia? Or will he be a Teutonic knight of circa 1400 in a head-to-toe suit of articulated Gothic plate-armor and B****** sword? Will the samurai be wearing the older box-like Muromachi armor and armed with a tachi blade? Or will he wear the later close fitting Kamakura period do-maru armor and use the more familiar katana? For that matter, would the samurai be allowed to use both his long katana and his wakizashi short sword together? These are significant matters that get at the heart of why such a question as who would “win” or who is the “better” fighter (or even whose equipment was better) really is unanswerable.

Of course, for the sake of engaging discourse let us hypothesize just what would happen if these two comparable individuals, each highly trained and experienced in the respective fighting skills of their age, were to meet on the battlefield in single combat to the death (!). As an amusing historical diversion we can at least make an educated guess to what would possibly be, not the result, so much as some of the key decisive elements of such an encounter.

The Warriors

We can reasonably assume that the personal attributes such as individual strength, speed, stamina, age, health, and courage, are fairly consistent between such professional warriors. Assuming we can somehow control for these attributes, we could match combatants with some equality. It would not be unrealistic to believe on a whole that neither was likely decisively stronger or faster than the other. Although, we can’t discount physiology as a factor and this would certainly be a reasonable advantage for the European (16th century samurai armor examples are sized for men around 5’3”-5’5”, while European armor from the same period and earlier would fit men ranging from just under 6’ to about 6’5”). Although, other evidence suggests average European heights in the 16th century were just above 5 feet. Interestingly, while the European concept of physical fitness among knights by the 15th century emphasized the classical Greco-Roman youthful physique of a narrow waist and broad shoulders on a lean frame, the Japanese ideal was one of a more mature man having a wider base and broader middle –no doubt reflecting the natural ethnographic characteristics of each race, but also influencing the fighting techniques they employed. To what degree this occurred is worth contemplating.

We might also want to consider the forms of warfare each swordsman was experienced in and focused upon. The early samurai engaged in a ritualized style of warfare where individual champions might fight separate battlefield duels following established protocols, as opposed to a later mounted archery style of combat amidst pike formations of lesser foot soldiers. Their clan warfare was decidedly feudalistic yet with acquiring and honor and renown also being a goal. Skirmishing was not also uncommon and there were a few large scale military expeditions to Korea and surrounding islands. But most combat occurred in the environment of the home islands.

Whereas in contrast, knights emphasized mounted shock warfare with couched lances, and off the field a concern for chivalric and judicial duels as well as tournaments of all kinds. The Western way of war for knights was directed more at a traditional battle of annihilation as part of an overall campaign of conquest. Yet, individual challenges, whether to the death or not, were frequent. Knightly arms and armor were the result of a dynamic interaction of Latin, Celtic, and Germanic cultures as well as Turkish and Arabic influences. The environment knights fought under was extensive and diverse, ranging from the cold of Scandinavia to the deserts of the Middle East, from the plains of Western Europe to the deep forest of the East, and the swamps, fields, and mountains in between. There is also no question that athleticism, physical fitness and conditioning were integral parts of knightly chivalric virtue as considerable literary and iconographic evidence from the period testifies.

We cannot overlook the role that culture might play in this contest. Samurai warriors existed in a hierarchical and conformist culture that rewarded obedience and loyalty over individuality. Knights existed in a more complex and fluid society that emphasized self-expression with a long tradition of reliance on individual initiative. Both cultures had experience fighting against outsiders and foreigners: the Europeans encountered the Turks, Mongols, Saracens, and others; the Japanese encountered the Koreans, Chinese, Mongols, and others. Thus, in considering the historical record on cross-cultural collisions in different locations, would we want to give the edge to the more socially diverse Europeans on this?

On an individual basis then, we must consider what effect might be played by the quality of fatalism within the samurai code of bushido, or rather the resolute acceptance of death that motivated the fiercest samurai. But then, we cannot overlook the quality of piety and faith that could motivate a noble knight to great feats, or of the ideals of chivalry that he might uphold to the death. It’s possible a Medieval European knight would have a certain disdain and scorn for his foreign, “pagan” adversary. Of course, the Japanese warrior’s well-known attitude of proud invincibility and readiness to die for his lord could equally make him vulnerable to an unfamiliar foe. Contempt for life and contempt for a dangerous, unknown opponent you might underestimate can be a disastrous combination. While courage is important, fighting spirit alone is insufficient. There are surely intangibles here that we cannot be measured with any reliability. These and other non-quantifiable, psychological factors aside, we are left with weapons, armor, and training.

The Armor

Armor changes things in swordplay. If you’ve never trained in it, you can’t imagine how it affects your movements and execution of even simple actions. It has been said that while Europeans designed their armor to defeat swords, the Japanese designed their swords to defeat armor. There is a certain truth to this, but it’s a simplistic view. The better Japanese armor was constructed of small overlapping lacquered metal scales or plates tied together with silk cords in order to specifically resist the slicing cut of the katana. It allowed good freedom of movement while offering excellent protection. But if it got wet, the silk cords soaked up water and it became terribly heavy. Though the earliest styles of samurai armor were designed with large square plates more as a defense against arrows, the later forms were intended primarily to be used by and against similarly equipped swordsmen and to lessen the tremendous cutting capacity of their swords. It was durable, effective, and provided for ample movement. But how would it hold up to the stabs of a narrowly pointed knightly sword? This is an important question.

Medieval European armor was designed and shaped more to deflect strikes and absorb blunt force blows from lances and swords. A knight's armor varied from simple byrnies of fine riveted maile ("chainmaile") that could absorb slices and prevent cuts, to well-padded soft jackets, and metal coats-of-plates which were designed equally to protect from concussion weapons as penetrating thrusts. Maile armor existed in numerous styles and patterns but arguably reached its zenith in 15th century Western Europe, where closely-woven riveted links could resist any drawing slice as well as being proof against many slashes and thrusts from swords. Maile of such equivalent was not used in Japan.

A complete suit of fully articulated rigid plate-armor, which has been described as unequaled in its ingenuity and strength, was nearly resistant to sword blows and required entirely different specialized weapons to effectively defeat it. With its tempered steel and careful curved fluting it was just invulnerable to sword cuts-even, it can be surmised, those of the exceptionally sharp katana (some high-ranking 16th century samurai lords actually owned pieces of contemporary European armor, gifts and purchases which they even wore into battle -they did not prize them merely as exotica). Plate-armor for foot combat was well-balanced, maneuverable, and sometimes even made of tempered steel. It was well-suited for fighting in, and is far from the awkward, lumbering cliché presented by Hollywood. Unless you've worn accurate well-made plate of this kind, it is impossible to really know how it influenced the way a knight would move.

Without the necessary weapons designed intentionally to face and defeat plate armor, any fighter armed with a sword alone would have difficulty (katana or not). Indeed, full European plate armor with maile might very well damage the keen edge on particularly fine katanas. After all, we should not forget that despite the katana's vaunted cutting ability, the samurai were able to successfully rely on their armors as defense against it. There is every reason to imagine knightly armor would have been just as, if not more, effective. If we therefore assume the armors to be more evenly matched, say maile and partial plate for the knight as used around 1250, things would get more interesting. However, the samurai did often carry an excellent thick dagger which would have been quite useful. Curiously, each warrior was highly skilled in using their respective armor-piercing daggers and with close-in grappling (something not generally known about actual knightly fencing skills).

The Shield

We must consider whether the knight in this hypothetical duel will be armed in the familiar shield and short sword style or will use only a single long-sword? If armed with a shield, we must ask what kind? Will the knight employ a center-gripped type with front umbo or one worn by enarme straps? Will the shield be the highly effective “kite” shape with its superb defense or one of the smaller, more maneuverable convex “heater” styles? How about a thick steel buckler (a fist-gripped hand shield)?

There’s a reason virtually every culture developed the shield and that they were literally used for thousands of years. They were very effective. In 15th century Europe, it was only the combination of the development of full plate armor and two-handed swords combined with heavy pole-arms and powerful missile weapons that finally reduced the long reigning value of the shield in warfare. The Medieval style of sword and shield fighting is distinctly different from the two-hand grip and quick full-arm slashing cuts of Kenjutsu. Medieval short swords are properly wielded with more of a throw of the arm and a twist of the hips while making passing steps forward or back. Strikes are thrown from behind the shield while it simultaneously guards, feints, deflects, or presses. A sword and shield is a great asset over a single sword alone. Fighting with sword and shield offers a well-rounded and strong defense that safely permits a wide range of both direct and combination attacks.

A sword can cut quite well from almost all angles around or underneath a shield. Indeed, since the shield side is so well guarded, the opponent is the one limited to attacking to only one side –the non-shield side. While a large shield does indeed close off a tremendous amount of targets to an attacker, it also limits, to a far smaller degree, freedom to attack by the shield user. As it comes out from behind their shield to strike, an attacker’s weapon can be counter-timed and counter-cut –and this is indeed one tactic to employ against a shield user. Yet a shield user’s attacks are not at all one sided. A shield can be used offensively in a number of ways and at very close range.

Katanas are powerful swords used with strong techniques, but thinking they could simply cleave through a stout Medieval shield is absurd. Even with a katana a shield cannot simply be sliced through. Medieval shields were fairly thick wood covered in leather and usually trimmed in metal. Not only that, they were highly maneuverable, making solid, shearing blows difficult. More likely, a blade would be momentarily stuck in the rim if it struck too forcefully. Unlike what is seen in the movies, or described in heroic literature, chopping into a shield’s edge can temporarily cause the sword blade to wedge into the shield for just an instant and thereby be delayed in recovering or renewing an attack (and exposing the attacker's arms to a counter-cut). Shields without metal rims were even favored for this very reason.

Kenjutsu (Japanese swordsmanship), though consisting of very effective counter-cutting actions, also has no real indigenous provisions for fighting shields. Although a skilled warrior could certainly improvise some, those unfamiliar with the formidable effectiveness and versatility of a sword and shield combination will have a hard time. The shield was not used the way typically shown in movies, video games, stage-combat, or historical role-playing organizations such as the SCA. Fighting against a Medieval shield is not simply a matter of maneuvering around it or aiming blows elsewhere. If a warrior does not really know the shield, or hasn’t faced a good shield fighter, then they cannot be expected to know how to ideally fight against it.

The Samurai’s Sword

In major battles among each warrior, a suit of armor was typically worn and a sword wielded in one or two-hands. For the knight, the primary weapons had always been the long lance and the sword, and to a lesser degree the polaxe, dagger, and mace. The sword was always the foundational weapon of a Knight’s fencing training. For the samurai however, the sword was but one of three major weapons along with the bow and arrow and the yari (thrusting spear). We should consider that, despite their later acquired reputation for swordsmanship, the samurai’s primary weapon was, in fact, not the sword. The sword really did not even become a premier weapon of samurai culture and reach its cult status until the mid to late 17th century when the civil warring period ended. It is something of a myth that every individual Japanese samurai was himself an expert swordsman (no more true than every wild West cowboy was an expert gunfighter). After all, the expression so associated with bushido is "the Way of the horse and bow", not "the Way of the sword." Besides, unlike knightly chivalric tales and combat accounts, the majority of single combats between samurai described in feudal Japanese literature took place with daggers not swords. But for sake of discussion, let us assume such for both fighters in this imaginary case.

As a sword, the Japanese katana is unmatched in its sharpness and cutting power. Furthermore, it is particularly good at cutting against metal (–but no, it only cuts through other swords in movies and video games!). However, Medieval plate armor is well known for its resistance to cutting, and cutting at a moving target hidden by a shield or a greatsword is not easy. While the edge of a katana is very strong with a sharp cutting bevel, it is a thick wedge shape and still has to move aside material as it cuts. Though this is devastating on a draw slice against flesh and bone, it is much less effective against armors. Realizing this, several styles of Japanese swordsmanship devised specific techniques not to cut at armor, but to stab and thrust at the gaps and joints of it just as the Europeans did against their own plate armor. The primary technique for fighting nearly any kind of armor with most any kind of sword is not to cut but to thrust at the gaps and joints.

Except for major interaction in Korea and encounters against the Mongols, the katana developed in comparative isolation and is not quite the “ultimate sword” some of its ardent admirers occasionally build it up as. The katana’s exceptionally hard edge was prone to chipping and needed frequent re-polishing and its blade could break or bend the same as any other sword might (...and no, they won't slice through cars or chop into concrete pillars either). It was not designed to take a great deal of abuse, and is not as resilient in flexibility nor intended to directly oppose soft or hard armors as some forms of Medieval swords had to be.

The katana’s design was not set in stone. It was changed and altered over the centuries like any other sword, being slowly improved or adapted to the different needs and tastes of their users in terms of cross section, curvature, and length. In the 13th century for instance, their points had to be redesigned because they were prone to snapping against the metal reinforced "studded" leather armor (essentially equivalent to European brigandine or armor) of the Mongols and Chinese. By the 18th century their blades, no longer used earnestly against armor, tended to be made longer, lighter, and thinner for classroom practicing.

True, the Japanese feudal warrior did have their own form of greatsword in the long no dachi blades, these however were employed specifically by lower ranking foot-soldiers against horses (and presumably, on occasion against pikes). So, we cannot draw an equivalency between these and Medieval greatswords used in knightly fencing arts or to the true two-handers of 16th century European battlefields.

Over all the katana was a very well-rounded design: excellent at cutting and slicing, yet good at thrusting, and suitable for armored or unarmored fighting on foot or horseback, either one or two-handed. It was a carefully crafted and beautiful weapon reflecting generations of artistry and fearsome necessity, but it was still only a sword –a man-made tool of well-tempered and expertly polished metal. Though the details of manufacture differed, they were made by the same fundamental scientific processes of heating and hand-working metal by shaping and grinding as were other fine swords around the world throughout history. Regardless of how they are designed or constructed, all swords have the same goals and perform the same functions: that of guarding against attacks while delivering their own lethal blows.

The Knight’s Swords

Having equipped our samurai, we must turn to the sword to be used by our knightly combatant. It must be understood there was such a great diversity of knightly swords and armor types. European swords were, in a sense, always specialized rather than generalized designs: there were ones for foot combat, ones for horseback, single and double-hand ones, straight and curved ones, ones for armored and for unarmored fighting, ones for tournaments, ones for civilian duelling, ones ideal just for thrusting or for cutting only, and ones only for training.

A knight’s arming sword was typically a one-handed weapon originally (but not always) intended specifically for use with a shield. Their blades are wide and fairly thin and rigid, with chisel-like edges intentionally designed for cutting through maile armor and deep into flesh and bone with a quick, forceful blow. They were light, agile, and stiff, yet very flexible to withstand the trauma of use. They too varied with time from the wider, flatter kinds to those rigid, tapering, sharply pointed and well suited for stabbing both plate and laminated armors. The later wide-based and acutely pointed style of B****** sword was superb at thrusting. So, even though Japanese armor for the most part was made up of the same quality steel as went into their weapons, European blades would likely not encounter anything especially difficult with it that they didn’t already face.

Although the Medieval sword and shield combination was fairly common, longer blades useable in two hands were in widespread use from about 1250 to roughly 1600 in Europe. When we talk about Medieval European longswords or war-swords (or even greatswords), we are not dealing with a single uniform style. There were wide, flat blades with parallel edges well suited to powerful cuts. Later, swords specifically designed for facing heavier armor had narrower, much more rigid blades of diamond or hexagonal cross-sections that tapered to hard, sharp points. They were used to whack and bash at armor before stabbing and thrusting into joints and gaps. They were also employed as short spears and even warhammers, yet were still capable of cutting at more lightly armored opponents.

The difference between these two European blade forms is significant and once more underscores the distinction between the manner of using a katana and a straight Medieval European sword. The tapering blade form has a different center of balance and is often a lighter blade. Its point of percussion is located farther down the blade and its fine point is capable of making quick, accurate, and strong thrusts. The wider style can make a somewhat greater variety of strikes and delivers more effective cuts overall. But the later is more agile and easier to guard and parry with. It can also more easily employ its versatile hilt in binding, trapping, and striking. Its proper techniques and style of use is rarely depicted with any accuracy in movies and staged performances. Almost never is the proper historical usage shown with its tighter movements, various thrusts, and infighting with the hilt.

The reach factor also cannot be overlooked. Although a skilled fighter can effectively use a short blade against a long blade or vice versa, and although neither longswords nor katanas had standardized lengths, overall the katana in general is significantly shorter than European two-handed swords and great-swords. A longer two-edged weapon does have advantages -especially if used by a taller man against a smaller with a shorter single-edge weapon. Surprisingly though, the weights between the two weapons are actually very similar and vary within the same degrees.

Surprisingly, the longsword or greatsword is arguably a more complex weapon that the katana. Though there were single-edge versions, it generally has two edges that can be used, as well as a versatile crossguard and pommel permitting a variety of specialized techniques. Another element to consider is that European swords could be used in "half-sword" techniques where the second hand literally grips around the blade itself to wield the weapon in bashing, deflecting, binding, and trapping in all manner of ways that virtually make it a pole-axe or short spear. This was especially effective in fighting against plate armor. We must ponder would this be unusual for the samurai or just very similar to fighting with a short staff? Either way, with its especially sharp edge, a katana is not employed quite like this.

Knightly blades could be excellent swords, but are often denigrated merely as crude hunks of iron while samurai swords are venerated and exalted sometimes to the point of absurdity by collectors and enthusiasts (something the Japanese themselves do not discourage). Bad films and poorly trained martial artists reinforce this myth. The bottom line is that Medieval swords were indeed well-made, light, agile fighting weapons equally capable of delivering dismembering cuts or cleaving deep into body cavities. They were far from the clumsy, heavy things they’re often portrayed as in popular media and far, far more than a mere "club with edges." Interestingly, the weight of katanas compared to longswords is very close with each on average being less than 4 pounds.

The Swordsmanship

It can be difficult for those not familiar with the nature of a Medieval longsword or greatsword to understand its true manner of use, since the general public as well as martial artists of Asian styles are far more familiar with the katana's style. So, if instead of a shield and sword we match a knight with a longsword or greatsword against the katana armed samurai this could make a significant difference. But, we must not fall into the mistake of judging the Medieval longsword in terms of what we know about classical Japanese fencing. It is a mistake to think the straight, double-edged Medieval sword with cruciform-hilt is handled like a curved katana.

While there are certainly similarities and universal commonalties between the two styles of swordsmanship (such as in stances and cuts), there are also significant and fundamental differences. They each make the same basic seven or eight cuts and can thrust. But as a curved blade with an especially keen edge, the katana is superior in the potential use of quick, short slices. Yet, as a long, straight blade tapering to a keen point, the longsword is a better thruster. Additionally, its dual edges, enabled by a graspable pommel, allow it to attack along more lines than just eight standard cuts. Having two edges to work with can quickly permit back-edge and reverse cuts. This permits a far larger number of strikes from different angles. These back edge cuts make up a significant portion of how the straight longsword was wielded and have seldom been appreciated or correctly demonstrated.

The katana is wielded in a quick-flowing manner with a torque of the grip as well as a push of the hips. Pulling a curved blade in this way makes it slice as it shears. The footwork is more linear with short quick hopping (even shuffling) steps. In contrast to the slicing slash of a curved, single-edged, Japanese blade, Medieval swords were made for hacking, shearing cuts delivered primarily from the elbow and shoulder and employing wide passing steps. The actions are larger with more fast whirling actions as the two edges are employed, the pommel alone gripped, or the hands changed to different positions on the hilt (such as placement of the thumb on the flat of the blade or upon the lip of the cross). As a straight blade it strikes more with a point-of-percussion on the first 6-8 inches of blade down from the point as opposed to the curved katana which uses more of just the first few inches. If we bring into the equation the Medieval B******-sword with compound-hilt of side-rings and bar-guards as well as the waisted or half-grip handle using various methods of holding, this could also be a significant factor. Such hilts allow for a variety of significant one or two-hand gripping options and gives superior tip control for thrusting and edge alignment.


When contrasting these two styles of sword we should probably also keep in mind a number of points. We classify each as longswords because both were blade weapons designed for the same purpose, killing. It is from this fact that they even have any similarities we can compare. Differences between them are result of the particularities of their functions and the ways they accomplish their goals. We should also keep in mind that Japanese swords and sword-arts reflect a living tradition, and one with a long standing interest group in the West promoting its study. While in contrast, our Medieval heritage has for decades had virtually nothing but Hollywood fantasy and role-players misrepresenting it.

From this, it can be seen that a direct comparison of a European sword to a Japanese one is not possible. They are “apples and oranges”, so to speak. They’re both fruit, both delicious, but you can do different, though very similar, things with each.

Educated Guesses

As our hypothetical fight ensued, any number of things might happen. In the course of striking at one another, a chance blow by either side could possibly end the fight. The katana may or may not be able to make a lethal or incapacitating cut (something difficult to do against plate armor, let alone a maile coat with a shield). But the knight, unfamiliar with the aggressive style or nature of his opponent, might throw out a strike that makes him vulnerable to a well-timed counter-attack. Of course, the samurai might also underestimate the power of the Medieval sword’s cleaving blows and agile thrusts, even against his armor. The average European two-hand sword is longer in handle and blade than the average katana by several inches to as much as a foot or more and is not at all slow. It has a versatile hilt used for binding, trapping, and parrying. But the katana is also a fast weapon that cuts strongly and guards well and comes in a variety of lengths.

Despite its considerable reach though, there are numerous techniques for infighting using the long-sword’s “half” guards and there are many techniques for striking with a shield. But then the katana is very good at close-in slices, which a straight blade cannot effectively do nearly as well. Of course, against good armor such actions can be negligible and fighting against shields was relatively unknown in Japan. So on one hand, the knight’s fighting style –either of close-in sword and shield clashing, or large passing steps with long-reaching shearing cuts and plunging thrusts with a longsword or greatsword –might prove decisive. On the other, the intense, focused, counter-cutting style of the samurai with his razor-keen blade and own experience in armored fighting might prove decisive. Then again, maybe they’d kill one another?

It could be argued that the samurai by nature could have a tactical advantage in attitude and fortitude as a result of the psychological elements of his training and fighting methods. He is well- known to have integrated unarmed techniques into his repertoire as well as having a keen sense of an opponent’s strengths and weaknesses. Still, much of this is intangible and subjective. Besides, although not widely appreciated, it is now well-documented (particularly from Medieval Italian and German fighting manuals) that European knights and men-at-arms fully integrated advanced grappling, wrestling, and disarming techniques into their fighting skills. They also studied considerably on tactics and the military “sciences.” There is no evidence to the myth that knightly martial culture was any less sophisticated or highly develop than its Asian counterparts –its traditions and methods only fell out of use with the social and technological changes brought about by advances in firearms and cannon.

While it is known that the average samurai had a large inventory of unarmed fighting techniques at his disposal, these too would be unlikely to play a part against a shield wielding warrior. Some could suggest that the samurai was simply a better swordsman and more tenacious warrior and would likely out-fight his European counterpart. Others could say, “No way,” and argue a skilled, superbly conditioned knight in full plate armor using either a sword and shield combination or a longsword would be near invulnerable and brutally overpowering. Still others could rightly point out that such over-generalized statements either way are un-provable conjecture. There are so many elements to address and practitioners who are experienced in one form of sword art or familiar with only one type of blade and not others will tend to favor what they’re familiar with. It is rare to find individuals with a deep grasp of the attributes of each method and the arms involved.

Those who think the Medieval sword and shield was and is just a “wham-bam, whack-whack” fight are as greatly misinformed as those who imagine the katana was handled in some mysterious and secret manner and can cut through anything as if it were a light-saber. Those who presume the use of Medieval long-sword merely involved a brutish hacking are also under a tremendous delusion. It is a mystery how such beliefs can be held independently of those who today assiduously study and train in the subject as a true martial art, and spend years in practice with the actual weapons. Perhaps this ignorance is due to watching too many movies or the influence of fantasy-historical societies with their costumed role-playing.

Medieval and Renaissance sword fighting is often viewed by the uninformed as a wholly subjective matter either consisting of merely brute force and ferocity, or else incapable of reasoned analysis and discernable principles. Both are equally inaccurate. It is sad when leading modern fencing masters (experienced only with the dueling style of light foils, epees, and sabers) will issue naïve, unschooled statements about how Medieval swords "weighed 20 pounds” or could only be used for “clumsy" bashing and chopping. There is a definite prejudice that the modern refined fencing sport is “superior” to earlier, more brutal methods. Without going into the history of warfare, it’s important to state it is a myth that personal combat in Europe was entirely crude, cumbersome, and never an art. It may perhaps be true that, only in a modern cultural context, it cannot compare to the surviving systematized traditions of feudal Japanese sword arts. However there is sufficient evidence surviving that when paired with contemporary research has given us a much better under-standing of the function and use of Medieval and Renaissance European arms and armors to confirm that they consisted of a highly effective and dynamic "Science of Defence."

Keeping our hypothesis broad

To be fair, while there is an extraordinary amount of nonsense and fantasy surrounding historical European swords and sword arts, there is a good deal of myth and ignorance on the true teachings of historical Japanese fencing. While there is today an active subculture promoting and preserving historical Japanese bujutsu or practicing modern budo and a great deal is also known about their practice, the equivalent can not yet be said for “lost” Medieval or Renaissance fighting arts. But, at least for the latter, there are dozens of surviving technical guides from the period describing the actual methods and techniques of knights and men-at-arms in great detail.

So, given the complexities of the question of what kind of knightly arms and armor from what period we could consider in a hypothetical knight-samurai encounter, it might be easier to just imagine an unarmored duel, sword against sword, without shields. Let’s assume that our gladiatorial fantasy would be fought by two respective 15th century warriors with single swords alone. In this way we essentially have two fighting men both experienced in using a long sword as well as fighting unarmored.

This solves a lot of questions. But even here the issue is problematic. We still need to ask what kind of katana and what kind of longsword? What length of blade and handle? There was no standard generic model for either weapon, after all. So, assuming that we choose two weapons of comparative dimensions, we could make the knightly longsword of the cruciform-hilted, double-edged, slightly tapering variety.

Under this scenario, the katana would have a slight advantage, we could imagine. It’s adept in unarmored cut and thrust fighting where the slightest wound from its keen edge could perhaps sever a hand or disabled an arm. It could also thrust well and might even threaten a pressing or slicing draw if close in. The half-swording techniques of the longsword would also not be nearly as viable here, though its hilt design might prove very useful. While the longsword would be menacing in its quick and long-reaching thrust, its stabbing attacks would perhaps not be that unfamiliar to a samurai use to facing spears. On the other hand, the knight would himself not be that unused at all to facing a curved single-edged blade, likely being skilled in or familiar with such ones as the falchion, badelaire, messer, long Grossemesser, and even Turkish scimitars. So again, the outcome of the match would come down to intangibles of personal attitude and individual prowess. As to the issue of the deadliness of thrusting wounds versus cutting ones, well, the historical and forensic evidence does favor the lethality of stabs--but only in contrast to lacerating flesh wounds not deep cleaving blows.

Considering the many issues brought out in describing the modern reconstruction of historical European martial arts, contrasting them with the practice of Asian fighting arts is a legitimate area of speculation. If we had a time machine and for depraved research wanted to go back, grab a hundred random Medieval knights and an equal number of samurai, match them one on one and throw them at each other, we might be able to come up some statistical averages (and some serious ethical problems, as well). In one sense we are talking about very different approaches to armed personal defense in this comparison. But, then again it's all the same when reduced to two armed combatants facing one another in antagonistic combat. There are many universal commonalities and shared fundamentals between both European and Japanese feudal warriors, but there were also significant technical and stylistic differences in their respective approaches. If not, their martial histories and their arms and armors would not have been so distinct.

So what can we really know?

As can be seen, there are just far too many variables and unknowns to make a judgment either way for such a theoretical question as who could defeat whom between knights and samurai. The fight cannot be reduced to any generalized statements about who had the overall historical advantage in skill or who had the superior array of arms and armor. In matters like this we certainly cannot not invoke mystical principles or endless “what ifs” and still engage in intelligent conjecture. All we can do is give an opinion of questionable value. Still, it is an intriguing comparison to ponder objectively.

There is so much unnecessary emotion encountered when fervent proponents of one or the other schools of swordsmanship speculates wildly on this topic. Amusingly, before reflexively reacting with a strong opinion one way or another when thinking about this subject, we might want to stop and ask ourselves to ponder the same imaginary contest between two samurai, for example, a Muromachi era versus say, a Kamakura one. Or we could do the same for the knight, posing the problem of who would defeat whom, an 11th century Flemish knight or a 14th century Burgundian one? By doing this simple mental exercise we can see the inherent problems of arguing one way or another over such imaginary fights.

Keeping in mind that live demonstrations speak louder than any words, hopefully this writing has cleared away some of the prejudice on behalf of both kenjutsu students and Medievalists. I personally give only limited credit to occasions of cross-sparring by modern practitioners of each respective art, as they seldom can meet under mutually agreeable or equally advantageous conditions for very long. Personally, while I admire the techniques and principles of kenjutsu as generally being highly effective (but not specifically its modern methods of instruction), I cannot disregard the proven efficacy of the sword and shield method. Nor can I ignore the formidable utility and versatility of an excellent European longsword or great sword when combined with superior European armor –and the difficulty it offers when posed against the single sword. But a fine katana can be a truly awesome sword. I have long been an admirer of its form and function. However, not all of them were superb weapons and typically the quality of European blades is erroneously denigrated and dismissed. Also, my own understanding of the German and Italian longsword and great-sword methods of fence from the late 14th to early 17th centuries gives be considerable doubt that a skilled knight of any era would encounter anything too unfamiliar in facing a samurai swordsman of any era.

There are many other factors that still could be raised when speculating on a hypothetical combat between a knight and a samurai. In the end though, my own answer to the question of who would win is that it is unanswerable...but would be an awesome experiment. Being a great warrior is a matter of individual ability and technical factors that are not exclusive to any one culture or time period. The better fighter wins a fight, and whoever does win is therefore considered the better fighter –or at least the luckier one.

[caocao74]

Simple opinion; the pre-sengokujidai samurai wins, from horseback, taking down the knight with his bow

[Zuo Zongtang]

We've already got a thread on this here:

http://www.chinahist...?showtopic=7261

However, since this is much more academic then the above thread, i'm allowing this.

[CARDINAL009]

A well written article.

CKS! Great find.

After reading this article, this Cardinal needs to shine his katanna. [LoL!]

This post has been edited by CARDINAL009: 29 September 2005 - 05:49 PM

[TMPikachu]

Great article. Though I would say the knight has a better chance of winning. A much much higher quality armor and a more versatile sword. Also ancient Japanese were little guys, he'd be physically overpowered by a big milk-drinking knight.

This post has been edited by TMPikachu: 29 September 2005 - 07:41 PM

[Mei Houwang]

With bow or without bow? With bow the Samurai without bow the Knight.

[caocao74]

Anthrophobia, on Sep 30 2005, 11:56 AM, said:

With bow or without bow? With bow the Samurai without bow the Knight.

Just in regard to bows. Hobilars (various spellings rendered) were mounted infantrymen, often equipped with bows. Were they always employed (a la dragoons) simply as more mobile infantry, or were they ever deployed as mounted archers? Is it possible to fire a longbow from horseback?

[TMPikachu]

caocao74, on Sep 30 2005, 04:29 AM, said:

Just in regard to bows. Hobilars (various spellings rendered) were mounted infantrymen, often equipped with bows. Were they always employed (a la dragoons) simply as more mobile infantry, or were they ever deployed as mounted archers? Is it possible to fire a longbow from horseback?

everything I've heard about longbows says you can't fire them off horseback. Exept those Japanese off-center ones, 'cause they're off center.



I think most 'duels' like this are about hth fighting, even that article is only about hand-to-hand fighting. Though it mentions archery duels in Japan, the 'what if' isn't an archery duel.

This post has been edited by TMPikachu: 30 September 2005 - 02:35 PM

[caocao74]

TMPikachu, on Oct 1 2005, 04:34 AM, said:

I think most 'duels' like this are about hth fighting, even that article is only about hand-to-hand fighting. Though it mentions archery duels in Japan, the 'what if' isn't an archery duel.

That I understand, but what is the point if (or in general with these 'what ifs') we remove the asset from one of the 'competitors'?

[CARDINAL009]

Forget about the physical settings of each warrior, the smarter one will attempt to fight the other in grander settings that favor him.

What do this Cardinal mean by grand settings?

Clue: Think big.