Warfare in Early Modern Europe 1450–1660

Paul E.J. Hammer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780754625292
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351873765
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

The early modern period saw gunpowder weapons reach maturity and become a central feature of European warfare, on land and at sea. This exciting collection of essays brings together a distinguished and varied selection of modern scholarship on the transformation of war"often described as a 'military revolution'"during the period between 1450 and 1660.

[1]
The "Military Revolution," 1560–1660—a Myth?*

Geoffrey Parker
St. Salvator's College, University of St. Andrews

"The sixteenth century constitutes a most uninteresting period in European military history," wrote Sir Charles Oman in 1937, and no one then dared to disagree with him. Today, however, few historians would endorse his verdict. The early modern period has come to be seen as a time of major change in warfare and military organization, as an era of "military revolution." This shift in historical perspective is mainly the work of one man: Michael Roberts, until recently Professor of History at the Queen's University of Belfast. His inaugural lecture, entitled "The Military Revolution, 1560-1660" and delivered at Belfast in January 1955, was an undisguised manifesto proclaiming the originality, the importance, and the historical singularity of certain developments in the art of war in post-Renaissance Europe. Now most inaugural lectures, for better or worse, seem to fade into the seamless web of history, leaving little trace; yet Professor Roberts's inaugural is still quoted time after time in textbooks, monographs, and articles. His conclusions, as far as I know, have never been questioned or measured against the new evidence which has come to light in the twenty years or so which have elapsed since he wrote. Such an examination is the aim of this paper.¹

Roberts's "military revolution" took place between 1560 and 1660 in four distinct areas. First and foremost came a "revolution in tactics": certain tactical innovations, although apparently minor, were "the efficient cause of changes which were really revolutionary."² The principal innovation in the infantry was (he claimed) the eclipse of the prevailing technique of hurling enormous squares of pikemen at each other in favor of linear formations composed of smaller, uniform units firing salvos at each other; likewise the cavalry, instead of trotting up to the enemy, firing, and trotting back again (the caracole), was required to charge, sabers in hand, ready for the kill. According to Roberts, these new battle procedures had far-reaching logistical consequences. They required troops who were highly trained and disciplined, men who would act as cogs in a machine; and the cogs had to learn how to march in step and how to perform their movements in perfect unison—they even had to dress the same.³ Individual prodigies of valor and skill were no longer required. Of course all this training cost money; and, because the troops had acquired their expertise at the government's expense, Roberts claimed that it was no longer economical for armies to be demobilized when the campaigning ended: the trained men had to be retained on a permanent footing. The new tactics, he argued, thus gave rise inexorably to the emergence of the standing army, and the first to pioneer these tactical reforms—and therefore one of the first to create a standing army in Europe—was Maurice of Nassau, captain-general of the army of the Dutch Republic.⁴

A "revolution in strategy" formed the second major strand of Roberts's thesis With the new soldiers, it proved possible to attempt more ambitious strategies: to campaign with several armies simultaneously and to seek decisive battles without fear that the inexperienced troops would run away in terror. Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden, victor of the Breitenfeld and conqueror of Germany, certainly put these new strategic concepts into effect; according to Roberts, he was the first.

A third component of the military revolution theory was a "prodigious increase in the scale of warfare in Europe" between 1560 and I66O.1 The new strategy, Roberts pointed out, required far more troops for its successful execution: an articulated force of five armies operating simultaneously according to a complex plan would need to be vastly more numerous than a single army under the old order. Fourth and finally, this prodigious numerical increase dramatically accentuated the impact of war on society. The greater destructiveness, the greater economic costs, and the greater administrative challenge of the augmented armies made war more of a burden and more of a problem for the civilian population and their rulers than ever before.

These four assertions form the kernel of the military revolution theory. There was, of course, a great deal more—the development of military education and military academies,⁵ the articulation of positive "laws of war,"⁶ the emergence of an enormous literature on war and war studies,⁷ and so on—but the four essential ingredients of the theory were tactics, strategy, army size, and overall impact. Have these assertions been modified in any way by recent research?

In the first place, it has become clear that the choice of the year 1560 as the starting point of the military revolution was unfortunate. Many of the developments described by Roberts also characterized warfare in Renaissance Italy: professional standing armies, regularly mustered, organized into small units of standard size with uniform armament and sometimes uniform dress, quartered sometimes in specially constructed barracks, were maintained by many Italian states in the fifteenth century. Machiavelli's oft-quoted jibe about the campaigns of the condottieri—that they were "commenced without fear, continued without danger, and concluded without loss"—was unfair and untrue. The armies of Renaissance Italy were efficient and effective; and the French, German, Swiss, and Spanish invaders had to adopt the methods of the condottieri, both in attack and defense, before they could make real headway against them. To a remarkable degree, as we shall see, the character of early modern European warfare, even down to its vocabulary, came direct from Renaissance Italy.⁸

There is no doubt, however, that Maurice of Nassau and his cousin William-Louis made some important tactical innovations in the army of the Dutch Republic. They reduced the size of their tactical units and increased significantly the number of officers and under-officers; they increased the number of musketeers and arque-busiers (the "shot") in each unit; and they introduced the classical technique of the "countermarch," whereby successive ranks of musketeers advanced, fired, and retired to reload in sequence. The last was certainly new, but, until the introduction of a more accurate musket which could also be swiftly reloaded, the countermarch was of limited practical value.⁹ Moreover, Maurice's other tactical innovations, described by Roberts, derived at least some of their "revolutionary" character from a rather unfair portrayal of the "prerevolutionary" warfare of the earlier sixteenth century. The Spanish army in particular, which Roberts used as a foil to the tactical reforms of Maurice of Nassau, was a force of impressive military efficiency. By the 1560s Spanish infantry on active service was normally made up of small, uniform companies of between 120 and 150 men, grouped into tercios (or regiments) of between 1,200 and 1,500 men.¹⁰ The Spanish infantry normally contained a heavy concentration of shot—it was the duke of Alva who pioneered the introduction of musketeers into every company in the 1550s—and in the 1570s there were at least two companies which consisted solely of shot in every tercio on active service.¹¹ Throughout the Spanish army, as elsewhere, the basic tactical and administrative unit was the company: men were raised, trained, and paid in companies, not in regiments and not as individuals. Although the Spanish army had no larger formal tactical units like the brigades or battalions of the Swedish army, it was Spanish practice to group a number of experienced companies together for special assignments to form a task force, known as an escuadrón, which might number anywhere between 600 and 3,000 men, depending on the task to be performed.¹² This flexible, informal arrangement for the infantry proved highly satisfactory. The Spanish cavalry, too, was impressive in action. It comprised mainly companies of light horse, each numbering between 60 and 100 troopers, some of them lancers and some of them mounted gunmen (arcabuceros a cabalio). In battle, as at Gembloux in 1578, their intervention was decisive; at other times they policed the countryside with ruthless efficiency. Dressed in turbans like the Turkish light horse, whose tactics they successfully emulated, the Spanish cavalry was as feared and as formidable as the tercios.

Spain's more permanent armies were also distinguished by a sophisticated panoply of military institutions and ancillary services. In the Netherlands and Lombardy, at least after 1570, there was a special military treasury, an elaborate and autonomous hierarchy of judicial courts, a well-developed system of medical care—with a permanent military teaching hospital, mobile field-surgery units, and resident doctors in every regiment—and a network of chaplains under a chaplain-general covering the entire army.¹³ Some, if not all, of this administrative superstructure was also to be found attached to the permanent Spanish forces in Naples and Sicily. Sixteenth-century Spain also had a complex training scheme for its men. In the words of an envious English observer of 1590, "Their order is, where the Warres are present, to supplie their Regiments being in Action with the Garrisons out of his dominions and provinces; before they dislodge, besonios supply their place; raw men as we tearme them. By these means he traines his besonios and furniseth his Armies with trained Souldiers."¹⁴ From at least the 1530s Spanish recruits were sent initially not to the front line but to the garrisons of Italy or North Africa, where they learned the rudiments of arms drill and combat discipline for a year or two before leaving for active service. Their places were then taken by another generation of recruits.¹⁵ It was an extremely efficient system, and it helps to explain the remarkable military caliber, reputation, and track record of the tercios. It was they, after all, who routed the "new model" Swedish army at Nördlingen in 1634.

Lest this should seem like special pleading from a starry-eyed student of Spanish history, one could point equally effectively to the Austrian Habsburgs, who introduced much the same system for their permanent armies on the Croatian and Hungarian border with the Ottoman empire during the 1570s.¹⁶ And, if even that were not enough, there are the military organizations of France, England, and the Italian states during the fifteenth century: all developed permanent standing armies which were highly trained; seasoned in garrisons before they went to the front; capable of fighting in linear formations as well as in columns or squares; organized into small, self-contained tactical units; and controlled by a special military administration.¹⁷ The simple fact is that, wherever a situation of permanent or semipermanent war existed, whether the Hundred Years' War of the later Middle Ages or the Thirty Years' War of the seventeenth century, one finds, not surprisingly, standing armies, greater professionalism among the troops, improvements in military organization, and certain tactical innovations. Gustavus Adolphus in the 1620s and Maurice of Nassau in the 1590s were forced to overhaul their armies dramatically because of the disastrous defeats which their predecessors had suffered in the preceding years. For inspiration, it is true, they turned in part to classical writers like Frontinus, Vegetius, and Aelian; but, like other rulers, they also turned to other more successful military practitioners, especially to the generals of Spain. Three of the best English military writers of the reign of Elizabeth—William Garrard, Humphrey Barwick, and Sir Roger Williams—had all served in the Spanish Army of Flanders for several years and held up its practices as examples to others.¹⁸ The war in the Low Countries was a seminary in which many of the great commanders of the German Thirty Years' War and the English Civil War were formed.¹⁹ It is no accident that a large part of the military vocabulary of northern Europe should have come from Spanish.²⁰

The Dutch, however, did make a distinctive contribution of their own. Maurice of Nassau and his cousin were convinced of the need for standardization and uniformity in their forces. In 1599 they secured funds from the States-General to equip the entire field army of the republic with weapons of the same size and caliber. At about the same time, Count John II of Nassau began work on a new method of military training: the illustrated manual. He analyzed each of the different movements required to manipulate the principal infantry weapons, gave each of them a number, and prepared a series of corresponding drawings to show what was required. There were fifteen drawings for the pike, twenty-five for the arquebus, and thirty-two for the musket. In 1606-7 the whole scheme was re-cast—now there were thirty-two positions for the pike and forty-two for each of the firearms—and a sequence of numbered pictures was engraved and published under Count John's supervision: Jacob de Gheyn's Wapenhandelinghe van roers, musquetten ende spies-sen [Arms drill with arquebus, musket and pike] (Amsterdam, 1607). The book went rapidly through numerous editions in Dutch, French, German, English, even Danish; there were pirated and plagiarized versions; there were many...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Series Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Geoffrey Parker (1976), 'The "Military Revolution", 1560–1660 - a Myth?', Journal of Modern History, 48, pp. 195–214.
• 2 Clifford J. Rogers (1993), 'The Military Revolutions of the Hundred Years' War', Journal of Military History, 57, pp. 241–78.
• 3 Gervase Phillips (2002), "Of Nimble Service": Technology, Equestrianism and the Cavalry Arm of Early Modern European Annies', War and Society 20, pp. 1–21.
• 4 Weston F. Cook, Jr (1993), 'The Cannon Conquest of Nāsrid Spain and the End of the Reconquista', Journal of Military History, 57, pp. 43–70.
• 5 Simon Pepper (2000), 'Sword and Spade: Military Construction in Renaissance Italy', Construction History, 16, pp. 13–32.
• 6 David Parrott (2000), 'The Utility of Fortifications in Early Modern Europe: Italian Princes and their Citadels, 1540–1640, War in History, 7, pp. 127–53.
• 7 David Potter (1996), 'The International Mercenary Market in the Sixteenth Century: Anglo-French Competition in Germany, 1543–50', English Historical Review, 111, pp. 24–58.
• 8 Fernando González de León (1996), '"Doctors of the Military Discipline": Technical Expertise and the Paradigm of the Spanish Soldier in the Early Modern Period', Sixteenth Century Journal, 27, pp. 61–85.
• 9 Geoffrey Parker (1973), 'Mutiny and Discontent in the Spanish Army of Flanders, 1572–1607', Past and Present, 58, pp. 38–52.
• 10 M.D. Feld (1975), 'Middle-Class Society and the Rise of Military Professionalism: The Dutch Army, 1589–1609', Armed Forces and Society, 1, pp. 419–42,
• 11 John S. Nolan (1994), 'The Militarization of the Elizabethan State', Journal of Military History, 58, pp. 391–420.
• 12 Gábor Ágoston (1994), 'Ottoman Artillery and European Military Technology in the Fifteenth and Seventeenth Centuries', Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae, 47, pp. 15–48.
• 13 David Trim (1997), 'Early-Modern Colonial Warfare and the Campaign of Alcazarquivir, 1578', Small Wars and Insurgencies, 8, pp. 1–34.
• 14 Geoffrey Parker (1996), 'The Dreadnought Revolution of Tudor England', Mariner's Mirror, 82, pp. 269–300.
• 15 George Raudzens (1995), 'So Why Were the Aztecs Conquered, and Wiat Were the Wider Implications? Testing Military Superiority as a Cause of Europe's Pre-Industrial Colonial Conquests', War in History, 2, pp. 87–104.
• 16 David A. Parrott (1985), 'Strategy and Tactics in the Thirty Years' War: The "Military Revolution"', Militärgeschichtliche Mitteilungen, 2, pp. 7–25.
• 17 Quentin Outram (2001), 'The Socio-Economic Relations of Warfare and the Military Mortality Crises of the Thirty Years' War', Medical History, 45, pp. 151–84.
• Name Index