The Morgan Picture Bible is more than a mid-13th-century masterpiece of art; it is a vivid and, at times, exaggerated lens into how medieval nobles envisioned warfare. From its gory depictions of battle to its meticulous detail in armour and weaponry, this manuscript reveals the ideals, values, and fantasies of the chivalric elite who commissioned it.
By Richard Abels
The mid-13th century French codex known as the Morgan Picture Bible, presently catalogued as M.638 in the Morgan Library in New York, consists of 46 folios on which are drawn a series of some 340 episodes taken from the Old Testament, beginning with Creation and ending abruptly with the suppression of Sheba’s revolt against David. It is truly a “picture Bible,” since it originally contained no text; the explanatory inscriptions on it in Latin, Persian, and Judeo-Persian were all added later.
What has attracted the attention of military historians is that 59 of its 340 miniatures depict battles, sieges, and military activities in vivid detail. The gory verisimilitude of the Morgan Bible’s depiction of warfare has drawn military historians to the manuscript and led some to regard it as an accurate portrayal of warfare in the mid thirteenth century. As Matthew Strickland has observed, “the quality and detail of its execution suggests a first-hand knowledge by the artist of the construction of weapons and armour and, by extension, their possible performance in battle.”
Bernard S. Bachrach would disagree. For Bachrach analyzing medieval art or literary fictions for evidence about the conduct of warfare is like studying Rambo movies to learn about modern soldiers. “Once the point is taken,” Bachrach wrote, “two questions come to the fore: why do fiction and reality diverge so fundamentally in medieval entertainment literature, and why do Westerners seem to prefer the former?”
Today I plan to address Bachrach’s questions through an analysis of warfare as portrayed in the Morgan Bible, and for once I will be agreeing with Bachrach over Strickland. I will suggest that the Morgan Bible’s value as a historical source for the study of thirteenth-century warfare goes well beyond the accuracy of its details about armor, weapons, and siege equipment, but that the codex’s value lies not in the realism of its representation of the performance of war. Rather, it is precisely its juxtaposition between accuracy of detail and stylized and exaggerated depictions of combat that makes the Morgan Bible so valuable as a window on the mentality of the wealthy lay nobleman who commissioned it.
Warfare as represented in the Morgan Bible, I will argue, reflected the cultural expectations of its patron and his household knights. What this audience demanded was not a representation of warfare as they had experienced it, warfare dominated by the drab business of pillaging villages, burning fields, and laying siege to castles, but of the type of warfare that validated and legitimated them as a military elite, one in which battles predominated and knights reigned supreme. Battles as depicted in the Morgan Bible, as opposed to the artist’s meticulous presentation of armor, horses, equipment, weapons, and siege machinery, were not based on the artist’s personal knowledge of warfare. Rather, I will suggest that what we are actually seeing are urban tournaments transfigured by the violence of the chansons de geste and by a lay religious ideology of salutary suffering, associated with but which transcended crusading.
Received scholarly opinion is that the Morgan Picture Bible was commissioned by King Louis IX of France probably sometime between 1244, when Louis took the crusader vow, and 1248, when he departed on Crusade. Because of this association with Saint Louis, the manuscript is thought to have been produced in Paris, perhaps by artists who were trained in workshops elsewhere. The evidence for St. Louis’s patronage, however, is far from conclusive. On the basis of artistic style, themes, and iconography it seems likely that the Morgan Bible was prepared in northern France toward the middle of the thirteenth century at the behest of a wealthy noble. The attention paid in the manuscript to Holy War against the gentiles, as well as a number of telling images, point to it having been conceived as a “crusader bible.”
The Morgan Bible provides a vivid and bloody depiction of medieval warfare. All 59 scenes are presented with striking verisimilitude. The main artist took meticulous care in the presentation of weapons, defensive armor, clothing, horses, supply carts, and siege engines, getting the details right down to the pins in the pivots and the engine’s latches. As a military engineer, he compares favorably with his contemporary Villard de Honnecourt, an artist from Picardy whose sketchbook of machines, buildings, and figures has led to comparisons with Leonardo Da Vinci.
The draftsmen responsible for the scenes of warfare were clearly familiar with knights, armor, and military equipment. But this does not resolve the question whether the artist was also accurate in his representation of the performance of war as well. The Bayeux Tapestry depicts the three main military activities of warfare from at least the eleventh through fourteenth centuries: battle, siege, and ravaging. The Morgan Bible does as well.
The military events depicted in the codex consist of 25 battles; 7 sieges (in three cases associated with battles) four depictions of armies ravaging or pillaging. Twenty-five other panels depict either preparations for battles or the aftermath of battles. What is particularly interesting is that the artists made little effort to depict the battles as represented in the Bible passages that they were illustrating, regularly ignoring any topographical or geographical details in the text. Fol. 12 recto depicts Ehud’s victory over the Moabites at the fords of the river Jordan (Judges 3:20-30) without a river and as taking place in front of the slain King Eglon’s palace. All the battles, in fact, depicted in the Picture Bible have an urban setting.
For the artists of the Morgan Bible warfare was synonymous with battle. This was far from true for actual warfare in thirteenth-century France. Real warfare was characterized by ravaging and pillaging, the most common military activities of the period, and sieges of walled towns and castles. What was striking about battles is that there were so few of them. The main victims of warfare were peasants and townsmen. There was nothing inherently dishonorable in pillaging villages and burning fields. These activities were legitimated by the dominant secular aristocratic discourse on war in the Middle Ages. Battle, however, afforded a far greater opportunity for a knight to enhance his honor. It therefore seems paradoxical that commanders who belonged to the chivalric elite avoided battle.
The reason was practical. The shared strategic doctrine of twelfth and thirteenth-century commanders was dictated by logistical considerations, by a military topography of castles and walled towns, and by the recognition of the unpredictability and risks of battle. Castles were the key to controlling territory and the key to successful sieges lay in provisioning one’s own troops while depriving the defenders of supplies. One could not take territory by winning a battle, unless the defenders were foolish enough to strip their fortifications of their garrisons. Battle was also risky for commanders who led from the front, which made capture or death very real possibilities. Richard the Lionheart engaged in at most four pitched battles. His father Henry II faced two major revolts and fought several territorial wars in France without ever leading troops into battle. Philip Augustus fought one great battle and a few lesser engagements; Louis IX, fought none before his crusade. As a generalization battle was risked either when one side enjoyed massive superiority of force and the other side was trapped and could not flee, or when one party or both believed that God was on their side and that victory in battle was seen as essential to legitimate a claim. In those cases, battle became trial by combat.
Attitudes toward battle are illuminated by a letter sent by Richard the Lionheart to Philip, Bishop of Durham, reporting his victory in a small battle he fought near Gisors in the Vexin in 1194. In the letter Richard tells the bishop that with a small number of troops, he defeated Philip Augustus’s 300 knights and a greater number of men-at-arms and townsmen, and took the town of Curcelles.
“We put [Philip] and his people into such consternation as they fled toward the gate of Gisors,” Richard boasts, “that the bridge broke down beneath them, and the king of France, as we have heard say, had to drink of the river, and several knights, about twenty in number, were drowned. Three knights also we unhorsed with a single lance … and have them as our prisoners.”
Then after explaining that he had captured one hundred knights; two hundred warhorses, of which 140 were barded; and an unknown number of horse and foot sergeants, Richard closed the letter with:
Thus have we defeated the king of France at Gisors; but it is not we who have done the same, but rather God, and our right, by our means; and in so doing, we have put our life in peril, and our kingdom, contrary to the advice of all our people. These things we signify to you that you may share in our joy as to the same.
The Morgan Bible’s emphasis on battles thus distorts the actuality of warfare in mid-thirteenth century France. Nor does the Picture Bible present a realistic portrayal of battle. The main impression that one receives is of unrelenting brutality. Blood and gore is everywhere. Helmets and heads are sliced open by sword and axe; heads lie on the ground separated from their torsos; arrows pierce helmets; lances puncture the sides of knights; a glaive slices through armor and guts a knight. The risks of battle were real, especially when knights fought foot soldiers, as the French knights at Courtrai discovered in 1302. But knights fighting other knights was a quite different matter. Chivalry militated against knights killing each other. The goal was to capture and hold for ransom rather than to kill.
According to the Anglo-Norman monk Orderic Vitalis writing c. 1130, the Battle of Brémule (1119) between the forces of Henry I of England and King Louis VI of France was fiercely fought, and yet only three knights out of the 900 who fought in it were killed. “They were all clad in mail,” Orderic explained, “and spared each other on both sides, out of fear of God and fellowship in arms; they were more concerned to capture than to kill the fugitives.” Orderic was undoubtedly exaggerating to make his point about the efficacy of Christian restraint, but his basic point was valid: chivalry in twelfth and thirteenth-century warfare largely came down to knights sparing the lives of other knights.
“They were all clad in mail,” was the first reason Orderic offered to explain why so few knights died at Brémule, and the armor of his day was not nearly as effective as it was to be a century later. Between 1150-1250, armor underwent a number of significant improvements. Hauberks were lengthened to cover more of the body; additions of mail leggings, sleeves, and mittens afforded protection to legs, arms, and hands. Gambesons were now worn under armor and surcoats and jupons over it. More maneuverable heater shields replaced kite shields, and the great helm now protected a knight’s entire head, including his face, while the brims of the kettle hats worn by infantry protected them from blows from above by horsemen.
All of these developments are carefully recorded in the Morgan Bible. And none of this armor, so accurately represented by the artists, seems to afford any protection from the various cutting, slicing, and piercing weapons wielded by the codex’s knights and foot soldiers. The artist’s attention to the gore of battle is as close as the care he lavished upon depicting armor and weapons. The result is that it looks horrifyingly real. But, in fact, it isn’t. The feats of arms we witness are physically unlikely. Some are probably impossible. In cutting tests conducted by historical re-enactors, a mail coif with leather padding, even without a helmet over it, stood up well against blows from a sharpened long sword. The mail was not broken or sliced through, although the meat beneath the coif and leather was sufficiently battered to indicate that the recipient of the blow would have suffered a severe concussion.
Comparisons between the wounds depicted in the Morgan Bible and those identified from skeletal remains from medieval battles are illuminating. Medieval battlefield archaeology is still in its infancy. Only a handful of battle sites have been excavated and the skeletons of those who fell in combat analyzed. The science of osteoarchaeology, however, has shed some light on actual violence suffered in medieval combat, and a study of the nearly 1200 skeletons of those who fell at Wisby in 1361 reveals the brutality of such warfare.
One can compare wounds identified on the skeletons at Wisby and the wounds depicted in the Morgan Bible. Most of the fallen Gotlanders at Wisby were foot soldiers, and the types of wounds they suffered are what one would expect from foot soldiers fighting against other foot soldiers and men on horseback: initial strikes against the lower legs and thighs to incapacitate; cuts along the arms where attempts were made to ward off the blows; and blows to the head, many of which were received from above when the wounded men were lying helpless on the ground. Significantly, the major wounds, such as severed legs or arms, occurred where there was no armor. The torsos, protected by old fashioned lamellar body armor and coats of plate, evidence few identifiable wounds.
All the wounds depicted in the Morgan Bible, in contrast, occur above the waist, and the vast majority are to body parts covered with armor. The location of wounds is what one would expect in combat between horsemen, and such combat dominates the portrayal of battle in the Morgan Bible. Foot soldiers are depicted in the Morgan Bible. But they are few in number compared to the knights, and most of them appear in scenes of sieges. In all, the artists drew 298 knights on horseback and 68 men on foot, and many of the latter appear to be knights fighting on foot. This is in inverse proportion to the composition of actual thirteenth-century armies, which normally had three or four times as many foot soldiers as horsemen.
The bloody wounds that characterize combat in the Morgan Bible are also unlikely. Thirteenth-century hauberks worn over padded jackets were designed to protect against puncture wounds. A horse-driven lance might on occasion pierce mail, which is why rebated lances were used in tournaments, as might a bodkin-headed arrow from a long bow. But, for the most part, a knight’s armor afforded him protection. As Steve Isaac noted, the most common injuries suffered by knights in combat with other knights were hidden underneath the knight’s armor and skin: broken bones, concussions, smashed ribs, and the injuries sustained when tumbling from or with their horses and being trampled by horse hooves as they lay on the ground. The last is highlighted by the author of the History of William the Marshal in his vivid description of a tournament:
Horses fell down there thick and fast, and the men who fell with them were badly trampled and injured, damaged and disfigured.
Why then did an artist who knew so well the accoutrements of warfare portray the performance of warfare in a manner so divorced from reality? To begin, it is highly unlikely that either the artist or his patron ever witnessed a battle. War was endemic in the early years of King Louis IX’s reign, but battles were rare. The last great battles fought on French soil prior to the making of the Morgan Bible were Muret in southern France in 1213 and Bouvines in 1214. What the artist and his patron would have been familiar with are tournaments, and tournament melees are what I believe we are actually seeing when we look at these pictures of battle.
One often reads that twelfth and early thirteenth-century tournaments were realistic war games very much like battles. But I doubt this. To be sure, knights gained practice with arms and maneuvering in squadrons in tournaments, both of which were useful in battle, but even if some lords such as Philip of Alsace, count of Flanders, brought with them foot soldiers to support their team of knights, tournaments mainly pitted knight against knight. As with tournaments, the battles depicted in the Morgan Bible take place outside of town walls. Indeed, the depiction of tournament melees in some thirteenth and fourteenth century illuminated manuscripts are barely distinguishable from the Morgan Bible’s battles—that is, except for the over the top violence.
The artist may have based his portrayal of battle upon tournament melees, but that portrayal was also informed by another source: the contemporary chansons de geste. My students at the Naval Academy are always struck by the exaggerated, at times almost Monty Pythonish violence of Raoul of Cambrai. The reason for this violence is clear: contemporary concepts of chivalry demanded it. In Richard Kaeuper’s words, prowess was the demi-god of chivalry. A knight could not be deemed a prud’homme, no matter how courteous he was, unless he proved himself skilled in horsemanship and the use of lance and sword. Even as cautious a military commander as Richard the Lionheart thought it essential to demonstrate that he was a prud’homme. Although Richard boasts of having taken Curcelles in his letter to Bishop Philip, he devotes more attention to the prisoners captured in battle, and at the head of these he names the three whom he himself unhorsed “with a single lance.” The contrast he draws between his own chivalric prowess and Philip Augustus’s panicked flight and shameful dunking is pointed.
The cult of prowess validated violence. What a modern audience might regard as horrible, such as the evisceration of a man by a sword stroke, thirteenth-century knights would gaze upon with awe and admiration. That much of the violence depicted in the Morgan Bible, the splitting of helmet and head, hacking through hauberks, was physically unlikely added to the enjoyment of its audience. This celebration of violence is the same ethos as that of the chansons de geste. Raoul de Cambrai is notoriously rife with bloody feats of improbable prowess: “They exchange great blows with their sharp swords,” sang the Raoul poet, “Raoul does not spare him as he cuts down through his helmet, for he dashes away its flowers and precious stones, and cuts through the coif of his strong hauberk, splitting him open to the shoulders.” Unsurprisingly, the carnage of combat is especially pervasive in the chansons associated with the crusades, such as the late twelfth-century Chanson d’Aspremont.
But it was not only a knight’s ability to inflict pain that was admired. It was also his willingness to expose his body to the horrors of war, to be a martyr for the sake of his lord. The blood and gore of the Morgan Bible externalized and made visual the internal injuries that knights most commonly experienced. It was the knight’s willingness to undergo such suffering that that set his ordo apart from the rest of society. The over the top violence of the miniatures emphasized to a receptive audience that knighthood was (in Shakespeare’s words) a “fellowship of death.”
As Richard Kaeuper has argued in Holy Warriors: The Religious Ideology of Chivalry, knights developed their own religious ideology which emphasized salutary suffering on campaign and in battle. To quote the Chanson d’Aspremont once more:
Count Hugh of Mans exhorts his men:
“Now let us charge this heathen folk, brave knights,
And force our way to where their standard flies!
What we owe God let us pay back in kind:
He died for us and we for Him shall die;
I charge you now to strike with all your might!”
The imitatio Christi of the knight was enacted in battle.
To conclude: The value of the Morgan Picture Bible for military historians goes far beyond its being a treasure trove for details about military equipment, armor, and weapons. To be sure, the bloody combat depicted in it was not true to the reality of ordinary medieval warfare as practiced and experienced by its aristocratic audience, but it is precisely this gulf between reality and representation that makes the Morgan Bible an invaluable source for understanding the motivations and values of those who fought. The Morgan Bible reveals a chivalric value system which placed a premium upon knightly prowess coupled with a willingness to embrace suffering and hardship as morally redemptive. Its noble audience knew full well that they were viewing warfare as refracted through the lenses of the tournament and the chansons de geste, but this is precisely what they wanted and valued, the type of war in which a man could prove himself to be a prud’homme.
Richard Abels is professor emeritus at the United States Naval Academy and a medieval historian. He now hosts the podcast ’tis but a scratch: Fact and Fiction about the Middle Ages. A version of this article was first presented at the International Haskins Society Conference in 2010.
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