Early modern warfare

Early modern warfare is associated with the start of the widespread use of gunpowder and the development of suitable weapons to use the explosive. It begins, in Europe and the Middle East, during the middle of the fifteenth century and lasts until the end of the eighteenth century.

The current understanding of early modern 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.

Gunpowder weapons had been used in China centuries before cannon appeared in Europe. They appeared in Europe in the late Middle Ages 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 of 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, 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 harquebus 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.

The power of aristocracies fell throughout Western Europe during this period. Their ancestral castles were no longer useful defences. 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. The harquebus 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. 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.

The rise of gunpowder reduced the importance of cavalry, but it remained occasionally effective into the eighteenth century and still preserved among officers for symbolic reasons and among scouting forces for the advantage of speed. However, the power of the solely cavalry 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 on the Middle East.

The one partial 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.

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.

This transformation in the armies of Europe had great social impact. G.F.C Fuller famously stated that "the musket made the infantryman and the infantryman made the democrat." 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 threaten the power of the state. 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. 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. These nationalistic sentiments reinforced the popular army as men enlisted due to patriotic fervour and loyalty to the crown, rather than for money or allegiance to a particular lord as before. This also made conflicts such as the Thirty Years War ones of unprecedented devastation. Eventually the levée en masse and conscription would become the defining paradigm of modern warfare.

For the most part the wars were not particularly deadly by later standards. Armies were slow moving in an era before good roads and canals. Battles of maneuver were common with armies circling one another, often for months, with no direct conflict. By far the most common battles were sieges, hugely time-consuming and expensive affairs, but ones with only limited casualties. 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 changes in warfare quickly made the mercenary forces of the Renaissance and Middle Ages obsolete. 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.

This was also the time of the beginning of European exploration and colonial expansion and the lack of any significant intermediary period of early modern warfare proved decisive. Peoples in The Americas and Africa fighting with medieval or even ancient warfare techniques meeting the musket were at a great disadvantage and the ease with which these lands were taken displayed the gap between the two eras and their technology.

This spread of European power was also 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 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.

Navies, like muskets, were also very expensive. As nations became increasingly dependent of taxes, rather than feudal obligations, to fight wars, European society saw a transformation as the feudal aristocracy declined in power and influence and the middle class of merchants and professionals grew in power. This lead to events such as the English Civil War and the French Revolution as the newly powerful bourgeoisie demanded political power to match their economic contributions.

See also

• Early Modern period

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.