Strategy Before Clausewitz

Linking Warfare and Statecraft, 1400-1830

Beatrice Heuser

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138290907
• eBook ISBN: 9781351968355
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

This collection of essays combines historical research with cutting-edge strategic analysis and makes a significant contribution to the study of the early history of strategic thinking.

There is a debate as to whether strategy in its modern definition existed before Napoleon and Clausewitz. The case studies featured in this book show that strategic thinking did indeed exist before the last century, and that there was strategy making, even if there was no commonly agreed word for it. The volume uses a variety of approaches. First, it explores the strategy making of three monarchs whose biographers have claimed to have identified strategic reasoning in their warfare: Edward III of England, Philip II of Spain and Louis XIV of France. The book then analyses a number of famous strategic thinkers and practitioners, including Christine de Pizan, Lazarus Schwendi, Matthew Sutcliffe, Raimondo Montecuccoli and Count Guibert, concluding with the ideas that Clausewitz derived from other authors. Several chapters deal with reflections on naval strategy long thought not to have existed before the nineteenth century. Combining in-depth historical documentary research with strategic analysis, the book illustrates that despite social, economic, political, cultural and linguistic differences, our forebears connected warfare and the aims and considerations of statecraft just as we do today.

This book will be of great interest to students of strategic history and theory, military history and IR in general.

1
Was Strategy Practised Before the Word was Used?

Above all, the supreme military commander and the supreme decision-maker in the war should consult, so that they may ascertain on what [aim] they want to stake most of their assets and hopes, and by which ways and means they hope to achieve victory in war, or to bring or force the enemy to agree to an acceptably good treaty and peace. Once such a resolution and decision is made, one should abide by it in all cases.

—Lazarus von Schwendi, 1522–1583¹

This book presents a challenge, as it purports to deal with strategic thinkers in Europe, most of whom lived and wrote before the word ‘strategy’ was introduced to European languages.² Even then, European definitions of ‘strategy’ at the time of the French Revolution and Napoleon would still be far from what we understand by ‘strategy’ today. For example Clausewitz’s definition is very narrow: he defined ‘strategy’ merely as ‘the use of engagements for the object of the war’.³ Admittedly today, more than ever, the word is a catch-all for a vast array of meanings, ranging from a simple synonym for ‘planning’ to ‘foreign policy making in a hostile environment’ and to more complex definitions. These are many and varied, and might be summed up as ‘Strategy is a comprehensive way to try to pursue political ends, including the threat or actual use of force, in a dialectic of wills.’⁴

So how can we find a definition that is a useful starting point for the question of whether people thought (and argued) ‘strategically’ before the word was generally used? A different approach suggests itself. Rather than seeking one recent definition which could be projected into the past, we might begin with certain commonly recognised features of strategy. Strategy is about linking the use of force with political ends, or, when a more sophisticated polity has been created with its division of labour and its political and military leadership, about the relationship between warfare and statecraft. In this relationship, warfare is the tool of statecraft, next to others (e.g. the many tools of diplomacy, including forming coalitions, or alliances through marriage, or enticing an enemy’s allies away from him; or economic tools, such as trading concessions or tariffs; or ‘chequebook diplomacy’, the buying off of an adversary). As we shall see, warfare and statecraft went hand in hand throughout the centuries covered in this volume, and were not thought of as separate as they would be in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Strategy is also about identifying aims, as Lazarus Schwendi put it earlier. Moreover, it is about planning, and about making choices: the choice of ends, means and ways to apply the means. Strategy is about prioritising some tasks over others (this becomes especially salient when wars are prosecuted against more than one adversary, on more than one front, with potential naval and land dimensions). One may have to prioritise fighting one adversary over another, one front over another, one service over another, because one simply cannot afford to employ all possible means. Hence, strategy is about prioritising defence spending in some areas rather than others. And finally, to the extent possible, it is about choosing between different ways to prosecute a war. This may be entirely or in part because some forms of warfare would produce effects that would preclude the overall political ends pursued in the war (e.g. one would not want to destroy the prosperous town that one wishes to conquer). As the classicist Kimberly Kagan has put it, strategy is ‘the setting of a state’s objectives and of priorities among those objectives’ in order to allocate resources and choose the best means to prosecute a war.⁵ In other words, we can discern strategy – or reflections on strategy or strategic prescriptions – in the sources we are looking at once we can see that such choices or prioritisations were made.

This could apply even at the simplest level. If a group of humans is attacked, they may have three choices: fight back, surrender or try to buy off the attackers. Such a choice depends in part on the adversary: Genghis Khan’s hordes might have wiped out a village before its elders could attempt to negotiate. In classical antiquity, surrender might not have been a serious option: it might have brought no hope of survival as the adversary might still have massacred all adult males and abducted all women and children into slavery. With other adversaries, other considerations might influence choices. Fighting meant death, destruction and suffering, but a significant part of the population might survive to live in freedom. Surrender would inevitably mean a curtailment of freedom and sacrifice of prosperity, but lives might be saved. Buying off an attacker would avoid deaths and loss of freedom, but it could transform the relationship into one commonly associated with Mafia practices, where the criminals, well pleased with this bargain, would come back regularly to collect more ‘protection money’. (A historic example of this was the Viking raids on the British Isles, which were later turned into the ‘Danegeld’ taxation of the local populations.)

Besides being about planning, choosing and prioritising, strategy is also about consulting and explaining. Unless the prince is also the supreme military commander, to use Schwendi’s terms again, the prince will have to explain to his general what he or she intends to do, and consult him on how to do it. Such explanations would also be contained in communications with ambassadors or leading ministers, when they were not in the same place as the prince where communication could take place orally, and without a record kept. Unless one was dealing with an absolute monarchy, princes also would have to explain themselves to those who would help them finance their war – those providing money or men through taxation or feudal levies, or both. These, then, are the contexts in which we shall look for examples of the articulation of strategic reasoning in surviving sources.

This chapter endeavours to identify instances where strategy was indeed applied – or strategic decisions were made – in the context of war in the centuries and the writings covered in this book. And to repeat, most of these date from before the introduction of the word ‘strategy’ into Western languages shortly before the French Revolution. Thus before claiming, in the following chapters, that theoreticians of warfare conceived of strategy, we shall apply here the test of whether strategy was practised, using three case studies dating from before the time when the term ‘strategy’ made its first appearance. I have chosen three monarchs, because their biographers have claimed that they thought and acted strategically: the kings Edward III of England, Philip II of Spain and Louis XIV of France. In other words, I shall lazily dig where others have already prospected and found precious metal. Nevertheless, this exercise is worth doing, as I shall be applying the same criteria to define ‘strategy’ – the definition of objectives, the prioritisation of conflicting needs – that is the allocation of resources when these were not sufficient to address all needs at once – to all three. Only then can we tell if the precious metal found is gold in all three cases. In each case, one or two documents examined in greater detail will serve to conduct this test.

Polities, dynasties and wars of succession

To set the stage, we should briefly summarise the main patterns of relations between European polities in the Late Middle Ages. Throughout Central and Western Europe, systems of governance had emerged by which populations were ruled at several different levels and in a variety of ways. Many people were subjects of a local lord, who in turn came under a prince, or a more highly ranking aristocrat who in turn owed loyalty to a prince. Others lived in towns or cities which might have been directly under a prince’s authority and below that, to some extent, governed by their own elites. Some cities – especially in Italy, from which Christine de Pizan hailed – were themselves sovereign polities.

The king of France or the Holy Roman emperor did not have direct ownership of all the lands of their respective kingdom or empire, even if they expected an oath of fealty from the other land owners within their realm. England was something of an exception to this rule, as nominally, William the Conqueror claimed to have inherited all of England in 1066, and had merely loaned parts of it to his loyal vassals. But the fundamental principle of property that pertained throughout Europe – namely that parents would pass on the lands they occupied to their children – conflicted with the notion that the king of England was the ultimate proprietor of all lands. When the king asserted this right and denied his vassals an automatic succession right, or re-appropriated their territory, he asked for trouble. Three such waves of re-appropriations of land by Edward II, his wife and his son Edward III occurred in the fourteenth century, the earlier two each followed by a minor civil war.⁶ When in 1399, King Richard II tried to prevent his exiled first cousin, Henry Bolingbroke, from taking full possession of his late father’s Lancastrian lands, many peers of the realm rose up in support of Bolingbroke: Richard’s transformation of the ritual of automatic confirmation of succession – still marked as taking place by the king’s grace by being coupled with the payment of a fee or inheritance tax – into something the king could veto jeopardised their own children’s guaranteed succession rights.⁷

The problems of dynastic succession also lay at the roots of other wars, civil or domestic and foreign: the dividing line was quite blurred throughout this period. In principle, by the High Middle Ages, many polities accepted primogeniture. But in practice, this pattern of succession continued to compete with elective rulership, which applied to the supreme power in the Holy Roman Empire, or the doge of Venice, or the king of Poland even in the early modern period. Elected rulers quite liked to turn the principle of election into heredity for their children, and the process into something on a sliding scale between, on one hand, a mere going through the motions, and acrimoniously negotiated consensus on the other. This would always be a potential cause of war.

Prior to the general acceptance of primogeniture, there had been two patterns that were at odds with it, but which actually survived the general convergence towards a pattern of primogeniture. One was that of the succession, within a dynasty, by the worthiest or most able male in the family (in France it was later asserted that Salic law excluded all females, but whether this also excluded inheritance by males through their mothers or grandmothers was at the centre of the Hundred Years’ War). Given mortality patterns at the time, primogeniture brought a number of young children (or occasionally, somebody with a mental illness) to the throne, and inevitably the question arose whether the succession of an uncle or elder cousin would not be better for the security and good governance of the realm. Often such an uncle was appointed regent, like the York prince famous for his deformed back, the future Richard III, who would acquire a taste for the power this brought that he would not want to forego later. Or else several uncles or cousins would dispute the regency among them, the pattern underlying the Armagnacs vs Bourguignon Civil War, which Christine de Pizan lived through in France, and subsequently the Wars of the Roses in England.

The other was the division of lands, at the father’s death, among his sons. This pattern, which had moved even Charlemagne to divide his possessions among his sons, would be recognisable almost until the end of the period covered here. Thus William the Conqueror’s lands were disputed among his sons, so that initially, his two eldest sons, Robert Curthose and William II Rufus, laid claim to England and Normandy respectively; his third son, Henry I, ultimately reunited the territories after going to war with his surviving elder brother, Robert. After all the empire-building of his ancestors, Habsburg Charles V divided his global possessions between his brother, Ferdinand (I as Holy Roman Emperor), and his son Philip (II of Spain). Even Louis XIV of France, coming from a tradition which had upheld primogeniture and exclusively male succession rigorously for centuries, merrily departed from this principle when it suited his dynasty. He thus claimed a part of his father-in-law’s heritage for his wife in the form of the ‘devolution’ of the Spanish Netherlands. Later he was prepared to settle for an outcome of the War of the Spanish Succession that would secure the Spanish crown for one of his wife’s and his younger descendants (not the dauphin), in return for the latter’s renunciation of all claims to the French crown. This pattern and further quarrels over whether heredity through the female line was acceptable, and whether lands inherited through the female line by definition had to stay separate from the father’s lands and thus go to a younger offspring, were a recurrent cause of wars throughout our period, from Edward III’s claims to the crown of France to Louis XIV’s to the crown of Spain for his grandson.

Dynastic marriages, a tool of diplomacy widely practised by the late West Roman emperors and by the Byzantines, and warfare were two sides of the coin of Medieval and early modern statecraft: alliances through marriage were at least as valuable as whole armies. But both came at a price: allies expected reciprocity in commitment, and armies were hugely expensive. Add to this multiple alliances with interested relatives and their respective families, or partisan (arch)bishops or abbots with their lands and riches (and sometimes, private armies), and a pattern emerged which could be managed only by deft statecraft: allied interests would always have to be taken into consideration in decisions over what to priori...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• List of figures
• List of maps
• Preface and acknowledgements
• 1 Was strategy practised before the word was used?
• 2 Christine de Pizan, the first modern strategist: good governance and conflict mediation
• 3 Denial of change: the military revolution as seen by contemporaries
• 4 The invention of modern maritime strategies: the Anglo-Spanish War of 1585–1604
• 5 A national security strategy for England: Matthew Sutcliffe, the Earl of Essex and the Cádiz Expedition of 1596
• 6 Command of the sea: the origins of a strategic concept
• 7 Lazarus Schwendi, Raimondo Montecuccoli and the Turkish wars: peaceful coexistence or rollback?
• 8 Guibert: prophet of total war?
• 9 What Clausewitz read: on the origins of some of his key ideas
• Bibliography
• Index of personal names
• Index of place names and states
• Index of wars and strategic concepts