Early modern warfare

Gunpowder warfare is associated with the start of the widespread use of gunpowder and the development of suitable weapons to use the explosive. It begans in Europe and the Middle East during the middle of the fifteenth century and lasted until the mid-nineteenth century, with its apex during the Napoleonic Wars from 1792 to 1815.

The current understanding of gunpowder warfare comes from the works of Michael Roberts who argued that a military revolution occurred in the sixteenth century that forever changed warfare, and society in general. Since he wrote in the 1950s his narrative has been augmented and challenged by other scholars. When exactly the revolution occurred is debated, and whether it was revolution or a slow transformation is also discussed.

Cannon

Gunpowder weapons had been used in China centuries before cannon appeared in Europe. They appeared in Europe in the late Middle Ages; however, for a long time European gunpowder weapons were large, unwieldy and difficult to deploy. As a result they were mainly used for attacking castles and other defences, a task that was equally well suited to undermining or non-explosive weapons. The development of siege cannon did have an important effect: it quickly made medieval castles obsolete. For several decades warfare greatly favoured the attacker, but soon new forms of fortification were developed. Fortresses with sloping walls, to deflect cannon shots, brought the siege back to being one of the central aspects of warfare during this era. What this necessitated was the rebuilding of fortresses across Europe, generally a vast expense. Small states and local aristocrats rarely had the money to build these defences, and these groups lost power in favour of the centralized governments. The once mighty city states of Italy became parts of the French or Holy Roman Empires, while the small states of Germany were forced in vassalage to a greater power or coalitions.

Weaponry is often placed at the forefront of technological advancement and the invention of the arquebus soon began an arms race. The useful but still unwieldy weapon was refined and reduced in size through many rapid developments culminating in the smoothbore musket. These small, portable, personal weapons, which could fire projectiles over rapidly increasing distances with greater accuracy, heralded the growth of modern warfare. Gustavus Adolphus pioneered the sue of lighter field artillery in the 1630s.

Beginning of polygonal fortifications

Model of city with polygonal fortifications

The period from 1500-1800 saw a rapid advance in tehcniques of fortification in Europe. Whereas medieval castles had relied on high walls to keep out attackers, early modern fortifications had to withstand artillery bombardments. To this end, engineers developed a style of fortress known as the trace itallienne or "Italian style". These had low, thick, sloping walls, that would either absorb or glance off cannon fire. In addition, they were shaped like stars, with bastions protruding at sharp angles. the reason for was to ensure that every bastion could be supported with fore from an adjacent bastion, leaving no "dead ground" for an atttacker to cover in. These new fortifications quickly negated the advantages cannon had afforded to besiegers.

A polygonal fort is a fortification in the style that evolved around the middle of the nineteenth century, in response to the development of powerfull explosive shells.

The complex and sophisticated designs of star forts that preceded them were highly effective against cannon assault, but proved much less effective against the more accurate fire of rifled guns and the destructive power of explosive shells. The polygonal style of fortification is also described as a "flankless fort". Many were built during the government of Lord Palmerston, and so they are also often referred to as Palmerston forts. Their low profile makes them easy to overlook.

In response to the vulnerabilities of star forts, military engineers evolved a much simpler but more robust style of fortification.

Firearms

The power of aristocracies fell throughout Western Europe during this period in realtion to the state. Their ancestral castles were no longer useful defences against artillery. Their role in war was also eroded as the Medieval cavalry lost its central role in warfare. The cavalry made up of the elite had been fading in importance in the late Middle Ages. The English longbow and the Swiss pike had both proven their ability to devastate larger armed forces. However the proper use of the longbow required a lifetime of training making it impossible to amass very large forces while the proper use of the pike required complex operations in formation and a great deal of fortitude and cohesion by the pikemen, again making amassing large forces impossible.

By contrast a soldier could be trained to use a firearm in a matter of weeks. Since the weapons themselves were extremely inaccurate any training in marksmanship was of no benefit. A firearm did not require the great physical strength of a bow or pike, but could devastate even heavily armoured cavalry forces. Since a firearm requires little training to operate, the order and respect maintained by mounted knights in Europe and their Eastern and southern equivalents could be undermined by a peasant with a gun. Plate armor is no match for a firearm. The arquebus was one of the first firearms that were relatively light (they still required a stand to balance them) and could be operated by one person. One of these weapons were first recorded as being used in the Battle of Agincourt in 1415, which despite that was very much a medieval battle but the weapon had started to develop. The musket was orignally a heavier form of the arquebus, which fired a shot that could pierce armour. In the 1500s, it had to be mounted on a stick to keep it steady. The caliver was the lighter ofrm of the aquebus. By 1600, or so, these firearms were phased out in favour of a new lighter musket. For most of the 15 and 1600s, muskets were of the matchlock design. However, this was superceded in the 1690s by the flintlock musket, whic hwas less prone to misfires and had a faster reloading time.

While soldiers armed with firearms could inflict great damage on cavalry at a distance, at close range the cavalry could slaughter the gun armed infantry. For many years infantry weapons were a mix of firearms and pikes for defence. The invention of the bayonet allowed these two weapons to be combined into one making the firearmed infantry the vast bulk of all forces.

Unlike bows and arrows, muskets, the next development, were expensive and required significant infrastructure to produce. For the first time the industrial capacity (and wealth) of a nation became one of the central determinants of military success, conferring a significant advantage on the trading nations of Western Europe compared to more agricultural nations. Thus the agricultural nations were not able to raise armies capable of defending themselves, with more victories going to well-developed countries.

Nature of war

This period saw the size and scale of warfare greatly increase. The number of combatants involved escalated steadily from the mid 1500s and dramatically expanded after the 1660s. For example, the King of France could field around 20,000 men in total for his wars against Spain in the 1550s, but put up to 500,000 men into the field by 1700 in the War of Spanish Succession. Moreover, wars becameincreasingly deadly in this period. This may in part be attributed to improvements in weapons technology and in the techniques of using it (for example infantry volley fire). However the main reason was that armies were now much bigger, but logistical support for them was inadequate. This meant that armies tended to devastate civilian areas in an effort to feed themselves, causing famines and population displacement. This was exacerbated by the increasing length of conflicts, such as the Thirty Years War and Eighty Years War, which subjected fought over areas to repeated devastation. For this reason, the wars of this era were among the most lethal before the modern period. For example, the Thirty Years War and the contemporary Wars of the Three Kingdoms, were the most bloody conflicts in the histpry of Germany and Britan respectively before the First World War. Another factor adding to bloodshed in warthe lack of a clear set of rules concerning th treatment of prisoners and non-combatants. While prisoners were usually ransomed for money, they were sometimes slaughtered out of hand - as at the battle of Dungans Hill in 1647.

One of the reasons for warfare's increased impact was its indesiciveness. Armies were slow moving in an era before good roads and canals. Battles were relatively rare as armies could manoeuvre for months, with no direct conflict. In addition, battles were often made irrelevant by the proliferation af advanced, bastioned fortifications. To control an area, armies had to take fortified towns, regardless of whether they dfeated their enemy's filed armies. As a result, by far the most common battles of the era were sieges, hugely time-consuming and expensive affairs. Storming a fortified city could result in massive casualties and citys which did not surrender before an assault were usually brutally sacked -for example Magdeburg in 1631 or Drogheda in 1649. In addition, both garrisons and besiegers often suffered heavily from disease.

The indecisive nature of conflict meant wars were long and endemic. Conflicts stretched on for decades and many states spent more years at war than they did at peace. The Spanish attempt to reconquer the Netherlands after the Dutch Revolt became bogged down in endless siege warfare. The expense caused the Spanish monarchy to declare bankruptcy several times, begining in 1577.

The changes in warfare eventually made the mercenary forces of the Renaissance and Middle Ages obsolete. However this was a gradual change. As late as the Thirty Years War (1618-48), most troops were mercenaries. However, after this conflict, most states invested in better disciplined and more politically reliable permanent troops. For a time mercenaries became important as trainers and administrators, but soon these tasks were also taken by the state. The massive size of these armies required a large supporting force of administrators. The newly centralized states were forced to set up vast organized bureaucracies to manage these armies, which some historians argue is the basis of the modern bureaucratic state. The combination of increased taxes and increased centralisation of government functions caused a series of revolts across Europe such as the Fronde in France and the English Civil War. In many countries, the resolution of this conflict was the rise of monarchical Absolutism. Only in England and the Netherlands was representative government evolved as an alternative. From the late 1600s, states learned how to finance wars through long term low interest loans from national banking institutions like the Bank of England. The first state to master this process was the Dutch Republic.

This transformation in the armies of Europe had great social impact. J.F.C. Fuller famously stated that "the musket made the infantryman and the infantryman made the democrat." This arguement states that the defence of the state now rested on the common man, not on the aristocrats, revolts by the underclass, that had been routinely been defeated in the Middle Ages, could now conceivably threaten the power of the state. However, aristocrats continued to monopolise the officer corps of alomst all early modern armies, including their high command. Moreover, popular revolts almost always failed unless they had the support and patronage of the noble or gentry classes. The new armies, because of their vast expense, was also dependent on taxation and the commercial classes who also began to demand a greater role in society. The great commercial powers of the Dutch and English matched much larger states in military might.

As almost any man could be given a musket and with only minutes of instruction be able to be a soldier it made it far easier to have massive armies. The inaccuracy of the weapons necessitated large groups of massed soldiers. This led to a rapid swelling of the size of armies. For the first time huge masses of the population could enter combat, rather than just the highly skilled professionals. It has been argued that the drawing of men from across the nation into an organized corps helped breed national unity and patriotism, and during this period the modern notion of the nation state was born. However, this would only become apparent after the French Revolutionary Wars. At this time, the levée en masse and conscription would become the defining paradigm of modern warfare. Before then, however, most national armies were in fact composed of many nationalities. For example, although the Swedish Army under Gustavus Adolphus was originally recruited by a kind of national conscription, the losses of the Thirty Years War meant that by 1648 0ver 80% of its troops were foreign mercenaries. In Spain, armies were recruited from all the Spanish European territories including Spain, Italy, Wallonia and Germany. The French recruited soldiers from Germany, Switzerland and elsewhere as well as from France. Britain recruited Hessian troops until the late 18th century. Irish Catholics made careers for themselves in the armys of many European states (See the Flight of the Wild Geese).

Cavalry

The rise of gunpowder reduced the importance of cavalry, but it remained effective in a new role into the nineteenth century. The cavalry along with the infantry, became more professional in this period but it retained greater presige than the foot soldier. Light cavalry were introduced for skirmishing and among scouting forces for the advantage of speed. Cavalry charges on undisciplined infantry could still be decisive, but a frontal charge against well ordered musketeers and pikemen was all but futile. Cavalry, from the 16th century on, were more likely to charge other cavalry on the flanks of an infantry formation and try to work their way behind enemy infantry. When they achieved this and pursued a fleeing enemy, cavalry could still destroy an enemy army.

However, the power formerly wielded by a solely cavalry focused army was at an end. For the first time in millennia the settled people of the agricultural regions could defeat the horse peoples of the steppe in open combat. The power of the Mongols was broken in Russia and, no longer threatened from the east, that region began to assert itself as a major force in European affairs. Never again would nomads from the east threaten to overrun Europe or the Middle East.

The one exception to this was the Ottoman Empire, founded by Turkish horsemen, but integrated with the organization of the Byzantine Empire and the technological achievements of the Arab Middle East. Arguably the world's greatest power for almost the entirety of the early modern period, the Ottoman's were some of the first to embrace gunpowder weapons and integrated them into their already formidable fighting abilities. However, as European infantry became better armed and disciplined, by about 1700, Ottoman forces began to be regularly defeated by Austrian Habsburg and other forces.

Outside of Europe

The gunpowder era of warfare is largely confined to Europe. This was also the time of the beginning of European exploration and colonial expansion and the lack of any significant intermediary period of gunpowder warfare proved decisive. Peoples in The Americas, Asia, and Africa fighting with medieval or even ancient warfare techniques were at a great disadvantage even if they were only a few years behind developments in Europe. Thus much of the world was annexed to European empires before gunpowder warfare could develop indigenously.

In most areas not under European control gunpowder warfare did not develop for other reasons. As previously mentioned gunpowder and related technologies had been developed centuries earlier, and military engineers in China had developed more potent weapons than anywhere else in the world. The immense social impact of these weapons could have was noted by many. In Europe attempts were made to suppress this progress, for a time the use of firearms was considered a war crime, and any captured fusilier was immediately put to death. In Europe it was impossible to enforce these rules, competition between the powers was far too intense and any state that failed to embrace new technologies would be wiped off the map. China faced no such mortal threats, its enemies were far smaller and poorer and had long been dispatched with conventional forces. The Chinese government thus systematically suppressed the development of gunpowder weapons systems.

Ottoman Empire

At the beginning of the early modern period the most powerful state in the world was arguably the Ottoman Empire. The empire had been one of the first states to effectively embrace gunpowder weapons and used them to great effect conquering much of the Middle East, North Africa, and the Balkans. In the seventeenth century the state began to stagnate as more modern technologies and strategies were not adopted. In part this was because the military elite had become a powerful force in the empire and change threatened their positions. The empire also faced few threats from more advanced enemies, its long time rivals in Persia and Russia had few gunpowder weapons.

Japan

In Japan the pattern was somewhat different. Soon after European contact firearms were adopted in the nation and an era of gunpowder warfare followed for several decades, culminating at the famous Battle of Nagashino, where volley fire was introduced. However, once the islands were unified the Tokugawa shogunate launched an unprecedented effort to "turn back the clock" and banned all firearms. For several centuries Japanese warfare remained medieval and the society feudal.

Naval warfare

The spread of European power around the world was closely tied to naval developments in this period. The caravel for the first time made unruly seas like the Atlantic open to exploration, trade, and military activities. While in all previous eras, European navies had been largely confined to operations in coastal waters, and were generally used in a support role to land based forces, this changed with the new vessels and the increasing importance of international waterborne trade. The new caravels were large enough and powerful enough to be armed with cannons with which they could bombard both the shore and other vessels.

References

Keegan, John. The face of battle : a study of Agincourt, Waterloo, and the Somme. London : Barrie & Jenkins, 1988.
Paret, Peter. Gordon A. Craig. Felix Gilbert. ed. Makers of modern strategy : from Machiavelli to the nuclear age. Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, c1986.
Townsend, Charles. The Oxford History of Modern War Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Parker Geoffrey, The Military Revoltion and the rise of the West