10 Medieval Battle Tactics So Brutal They Were Banned

You start at a glass case in a museum of arms, looking at a crossbow that a church council once put under anathema in 1139. It looks like a plain tool. The story behind it is not about cruelty at all. This is a list of ten tactics and weapons that medieval bishops and kings tried to forbid: raiding the harvest, fighting on the wrong day, the revenge raid on a killer's cousins, tournaments, mercenaries, iron sold to the enemy, killing prisoners, poisoned wells, Greek fire and the crossbow. Each one comes with the record of the council or the king who tried to stop it. The question it answers is what these bans actually did once they left the parchment. The Peace of God protected a peasant's ox and sent the arsonist off to Spain. The Truce of God cleared the calendar at home in the same days that a pope called the First Crusade. Louis IX's forty days made revenge wait instead of ending it. It follows the line that every ban drew, between who could be harmed, when, by whom and at what price, and it ends back at the museum case with the label that says nothing about who the crossbow was allowed to kill.