ABSTRACT
All historians of medieval military art owe the basis of their knowledge and the orientation of their work to Ferdinand Lot. Liege, the capital, seat of the bishopric, possessed, with its suburbs, 20,000 citizens at the end of the middle ages; it could stand comparison therefore with some of the large cities of the Empire: Hamburg, Lubeck, Vienna, Nuremberg, Metz. Most of the information comes from the narrative literature, which was unusually abundant in the area of Liege in the middle ages. The two traditional branches of the army of Liege and of Looz corresponded, until the first half of the thirteenth century, to the two great classes of medieval society liable to military service. The count of Looz was always a small territorial prince. He could not raise on his own land enough vassals for an array in order to wage war alone on a stronger neighbor.
