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In the high Middle Ages the mounted knight dominated warfare in Western Europe. This began to change in 1302 when the French knights were defeated by Flemish infantry at the battle of Courtrai. The famous English victories of the Hundred Years War wouldn't have been won without the longbow, and the trend continued with Swiss pike men and Hussite war wagon making their own mark.
These articles take an interesting approach to this topic. We start at Courtrai, but we then take a sideways look at the other main topics, examining how the French eventually overcame the English longbow (at least in part by recruiting their own archers), looking at the defeat that convinced the Swiss to move from halberds to pikes and following the career of one of the main Hussite commanders. These articles thus cover an important topic but without going over familiar ground.
Away from the main theme there is an examination of the diseases that were rife during just about every medieval siege, a look at the changing fortifications of medieval Tunisia, and an account of the Mongol invasion of the Khwarazmian Empire, a major war that is probably unfamiliar to most readers. These are three very varied topics and give the issue a nicely rounded feel.
Chapters
Introduction: Infantry's tactical revolution of the fourteenth and fifteenth century
The Battle of Courtrai: The French knight defeated
Levelling the odds: Negating English archery on the late medieval battlefield
The Battle of Arbedo: The rise of the Swiss Pike
Jan Zizka's wagons of war: How the Hussite Wars changed the medieval battlefield
The invisible enemy: Disease in medieval armies
Medieval Muslim fortifications of Ifriqiya: Defending North Africa
The Mongol Invasion of the Khwarazmian Empire: The fierce resistance of Jalal-e Din
Codex Wallerstein: The important and intriguing sixteenth-century Fechtbuch