page_title: Scorched earth
section_title: Mid-to-Late European warfare
hierarchical_section_title: Scorched earth / Post-classical history / Mid-to-Late European warfare
caption_attribution_description: English: Robert I (known as Robert the Bruce), 1274 - 1329. Earl of Carrick and Lord of Annandale. Reigned 1306 - 1329Norsk bokmål: Robert the Bruce portrett
context_page_description: A scorched-earth policy is a military strategy that aims to destroy anything that might be useful to the enemy. Any assets that could be used by the enemy may be targeted, which usually includes obvious weapons, transport vehicles, communication sites, and industrial resources. However, anything useful to the advancing enemy may be targeted, including food stores and agricultural areas, water sources, and even the local people themselves, though that last has been banned under the 1977 Geneva Conventions.
  The practice can be carried out by the military in enemy territory or in its own home territory while it is being invaded. It may overlap with but is not the same as punitive destruction of the enemy's resources, which is usually done as part of political strategy, rather than operational strategy.
  The concept of scorched earth is sometimes applied figuratively to the business world in which a firm facing a takeover attempts to make itself less valuable by selling off its assets.
context_section_description: During the Hundred Years' War, both the English and the French conducted chevauchée raids over the enemy territory to damage its infrastructure.
  Robert the Bruce counselled using those methods to hold off the forces of Edward I of England, who were Scotland, according to an anonymous 14th-century poem:
  in strait places gar keep all store,
  
  And byrnen ye plainland them before,
  
  That they shall pass away in haist
  
  What that they find na thing but waist.
  
  ...This is the counsel and intent
  
  Of gud King Robert's testiment.
  In 1336, the defenders of Pilėnai, Lithuania, set their castle on fire and committed mass suicide to make the attacking Teutonic Order have only a Pyrrhic victory.
  The strategy was widely used in Wallachia and Moldavia, both now in Romania. Prince Mircea I of Wallachia used it against the Ottomans in 1395, and Prince Stephen III of Moldavia did the same as the Ottoman army advanced in 1475 and 1476.
  A slighting is the deliberate destruction, whether partial or complete, of a fortification without opposition. Sometimes, such as during the Wars of Scottish Independence and the English Civil War, it was done to render the structure unusable as a fortress. In England, adulterine (unauthorised) castles would usually be slighted if captured by a king. During the Wars of Scottish Independence, Robert the Bruce adopted a strategy of slighting Scottish castles to prevent them being occupied by the invading English. A strategy of slighting castles in Palestine was also adopted by the Mamelukes during their wars with the Crusaders.
caption: Robert the Bruce
exif: {}