The preparation of men for battle and their deployment on the field for combat are the focus of tactics. The successful military commander is one who is able to use most effectively knowledge of the tactics that are appropriate in a given situation and has available soldiers who have been trained to carry out his orders. As Frontinus explained in his well appreciated Strategemata, the proper education of commanders is one that allows them to apply on contemporary battlefields models of troop deployments that were derived from examples taken from history. The education of Ottonian military commanders and the training of their men to use a wide range of arms in numerous tactical situations were the focus of chapters four and five. The present chapter considers the ways in which fighting men were deployed by Henry I, Otto I, and their military commanders to defeat the enemy on the battlefield.

For the most part, information about the range of battlefield tactics that were available to Ottonian military commanders is provided by authors of contemporary narrative sources and, to a more limited extent, military manuals such as Vegetius' Epitoma rei militaris and Frontinus' Strategemata. It is clear that many of the authors of contemporary historical works had a parti pristhat led to the misrepresentation of information about military matters in a variety of ways.