This chapter examines the construction and representation of borders in China under the Ming dynasty (1368-1644). It considers the spatial dimensions of the Mongol empire, which was the Ming dynasty’s immediate predecessor. It examines the Ming court’s efforts to conquer or coopt Mongol power-holders and their territories, its plans to establish lasting control over those regions and their peoples, and its discursive and administrative strategies to describe and regulate issues of diversity and distance. The chapter reviews changes in the Ming dynasty’s geopolitical engagement in eastern Eurasia, tracing the dynasty’s loss of territory and influence along the northern and western borders and simultaneously a steady expansion of state institutions into the southwestern frontier. The essay concludes with developments during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, including responses to early Western European agents of empire in East Asia and, more broadly, the expansion of Chinese interest into maritime Asia.

The history of Italian warfare from 1300 to 1500 has been dominated by discussion of mercenary soldiers. Italian states used them throughout the Middle Ages and by the fourteenth century the practice evolved into a species of “system,” characterized by reliance on preformed bands of substantial size, containing also foreign soldiers from outside of the peninsula. The era of the “companies of adventure” (compagnie di ventura), as it is known, lasted from roughly the second decade to the end of the fourteenth century. It was followed by the emergence in the fifteenth century of individual native mercenary captains, condottieri, who settled into regular service with states and were the precursor to more permanent armies by the middle of the century. The reliance on mercenaries rendered Italian warfare out of touch with developments elsewhere in Europe, and left the peninsula unprepared for the onslaught of the armies of France and Spain and the Italian Wars in the sixteenth century. The invasion of Italy in 1494 by the French king Charles VIII was the signal event that revealed the weakness of Italian military institutions and more generally the strength of the rising nation state over its evolutionary predecessor, the city-state.

The Tang dynasty, which lasted from 618 to 907, was typical of China’s great imperial regimes in that it owed its creation to successful military action and saw its subsequent fortunes shaped to a very great extent by events on the battlefield; when its military power waned the dynasty faltered, and when that power had dissipated completely it fell. In the Tang, as under earlier and later dynasties, the ruling elites were intensely interested in matters of military policy and strategy, with military expenditures claiming the largest portion of the state’s revenues. For the Tang, as for all of the other dynasties, the image of Confucian sage kings ruling by moral suasion, without reference to force of arms, belongs to the realm of myth rather than reality.

Anthropologists believe that the Japanese archipelago was settled by migrants from the Asian mainland sometime between 140,000 and 500,000 years ago, when falling global temperatures trapped water in glaciers and the polar ice caps, causing sea levels to drop 120 m or more below their present levels, and opening land bridges to Siberia and the Korean peninsula. Permanent village settlements and a cultural complex known as the Jōmon, after the distinctive, cord-marked slab pottery found at most sites, appeared between 14,500 and 10,000 bce. Around 1,000 bce, a new wave of immigrants spread outward from northern Kyushu, intermingling with the Jōmon peoples and displacing their civilization with a new one, which archaeologists have dubbed Yayoi after the location of the first site discovered, in Tokyo in 1884. The newcomers brought with them bronze- and iron-working skills, advanced agricultural techniques, and more sophisticated forms of political organization.

The ways in which different medieval cultures justified war, theorized about war, and developed different customs that shaped the conduct of warfare varied widely. While the many “cultures of war” that emerged in the medieval world shared some basic characteristics, what is more broadly comparable are the processes or dynamics that shaped military cultures around the world. This chapter will explore, comparatively and as globally as the evidence allows, those dynamics and the cultural patterns they produced. It will argue that cultures of war emerged from a series of intersections between ideas about war on the one hand, and the various contexts within which wars happened – geographic, socioeconomic, and political – on the other. These intersections shaped cultures of war at the broadest level, and more specifically complicated the development of justifications of war, theories about war and its uses, and the customs that influenced the conduct of warfare within individual cultures.