Was there a Military Revolution in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century
Europe?
Image: The Siege of Vienna, 1683. Image
source:
Atlas van der Hagen, Koninklijke Bibliotheek.
Proponents of the "military revolution" thesis
seek to explain why it was that sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe was
so belligerent--why there were so many wars, so few years of peace during the
period. In greatly abbreviated form, their argument runs something like this:
1) In the Beginning Was Gunpowder: In the Middle
Ages, the relationship between attack and defense had tended to favor defense:
given available offensive technology, high, thin, stone walls had typically
been enough to defend against cavalry, arrows, and catapults. Not that every
medieval fortress was impervious to successful attack, of course. But as long
as this system prevailed, there were few incentives for change. Consequently,
the main transformation in military technology before 1450 was in the scale
of defensive architecture: one simply built old-fashioned castles bigger,
their walls higher.
- Consequently, war tended to be a matter
of maneuver, skirmishing, long sieges; but few major field campaigns, and
even fewer big and decisive battles.
The discovery of guns and gunpowder, especially
canon, overthrew that balance: siege artillery quickly rendered old-fashioned,
“vertical” fortifications obsolete. There is a reason why most medieval castles
today lie in ruins, and it is not neglect: they were too vulnerable to destruction.
2) New types of fortification restored balance—but at a high social cost: To
counteract the effects of cannon-ball, “walls” became lower, thicker, slanted,
and zig-zag; the first “modern” fortification wasn’t built until 1515, at Civitavecchia
in Italy, and although the idea was slow to take hold, it eventually spread
throughout Europe.
- New fortifications raised new problems,
however: unless steps were taken to strengthen state finances, the construction
costs of these new fortifications threatened to bankrupt all but the largest
and strongest states.
- New style fortresses went up in the Netherlands
in the 1530s, for example, and by 1544, the Netherlands had 15 new bastions;
by 1572, about 43 kilometers of modern defenses had been built; by 1629, the
Dutch Republic needed 128,877 soldiers just to defend its fortresses.
Costly though they were, the new fortifications
had big advantages: a heavily defended fortress town, equipped with enough soldiers
and adequate supplies, was too dangerous to be left in the wake of an advancing
army: it had to be taken.
- This placed unprecedented demands on attackers:
Attackers had to keep large siege armies in one place, year-round, often for
years on end; forts had to be completely surrounded by siege fortifications;
siege fortifications themselves had to be defended from relief armies; all
of it had to be built beyond the defenders’ artillery range.
- During the Thirty Years’ War, for example,
the Spanish siege of s’Hertogenbosch in 1629 required a siege ring 40 kilometers
long, and a siege army 25,000 strong.
All these innovations, finally, contributed
to a dramatic increase in the size and cost of armies -- which in turn drew
the early modern state even deeper into the business of disciplining their subject
populations.
- In 1631, Gustav Adolf commanded
a total army of 183,000.
- 62,000 of them were stationed
in 98 garrisons throughout northern and central Germany;
- 34,000 were stationed at home,
to defend Sweden and Finland from attack;
- 66,000 were conducting sieges
in Germany;
- That left only 20,000 for his
main field army, about 11% of the total force.
As this pattern suggests, the reality
of seventeenth-century wars was an endless cycle of sieges, small conflicts, and
marauding:
- Somehow, the newer and larger
armies had to be fed and clothed -- but without effective logistics, armies
took to living off the land.
- Hence the destructiveness of seventeenth-century
warfare was directly related to the military revolution as well.
The cumulative effect of these innovations
were three:
a) To increase greatly the frequency and
duration of wars;
b) To increase greatly the cost, even of shorter wars, in money,
material, and human beings;
c) To place a premium on the efficiency of state finances for success
or failure in war.
3) In addition to revolutionizing siege fortifications, gundpower
also transformed the battlefield: For obvious reasons, broadswordsmen disappeared
from European battlefields around 1515; halbersmen and heavy cavalry disappeared
soon after that; crossbowmen were gone by 1550; longbowmen by the 1560s. Roughly
from 1550 on, armies consisted of Musketeers and Pikemen (4:1), field artillery,
and light cavalry.
- However, the technological limitations of
muskets provoked a revolution in military discipline and training: muskets
are horribly inaccurate weapons, plus they take a long time to load; an expert
could get off one shot every two minutes.
- To this problem there were really only two
solutions:
- 1) Increase the accuracy of weapons:
Rifles are more accurate, but they take even longer to load than muskets.
- 2) Increase the rate of fire through
tactical innovation: A solution was proposed by Count Wilhelm Ludwig
of Nassau, commander of the Dutch army, on 8 December 1594: the technique
of volley fire.
- To pull it off, however, armies had to be
broken down into smaller, more manageable units (resulting, among other things,
in a much larger number of officers); the efficacy of communications had to
be increased hugely; equipment had to be standardized; and military training
had to be perfected so that battlefield formations could act in unison.
- It is no accident that the first
military school was established in 1616.
4) The Thirty Years’ War made the advantages
of this new approach clear: The Swedes were the first to perfect it, with stunning
results.
- At the Battle of Breitenfeld in 1631, an
Imperial Army of 21,400 footsoldiers, drawn up in squares 30x50 men on a side,
plus 10,000 horse, faced a combined Swedish/Saxon army of 28,000 footsoldiers,
drawn up in ranks, 6 deep, plus 13,000 horse, under the command of King Gustav
Adolf;
- Although Gustav Adolf’s Saxon allies fled
the battlefield almost immediately, still the Swedes routed the imperial army
in 2 hours, inflicting 60% casualties and capturing every one of the imperial
artillery pieces.
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