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.
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 daimyô (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.'
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 development 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.
by Stephen Turnbull
About the author
Stephen Turnbull is the leading authority outside Japan on the military history of the samurai. His previous books for Osprey include Men-at-Arms 86: Samurai Armies 1550-1658, Men-at-Arms 105: The Mongols and, most recently, Campaign 69: Nagashino 1575.
Suggested reading
Black, Jeremy (ed.), European Warfare 1453-1815 (1999)
Parker, Geoffrey, The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the rise of the West 1500-1800 (Cambridge, 1996)
Turnbull, Stephen, Campaign 69: Nagashino 1575 (Oxford, 2000)
Turnbull, Stephen, The Samurai Sourcebook (Cassell, 1998)
Turnbull, Stephen, Samurai Warfare (Cassell, 1996)