THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES (22 page)

By means of a state, oligarchs and princes could enhance their preparations for security, while attaching themselves to an institution that would legitimate their acts. Soon this new institution had spread to other regions, prompting Christopher Marlowe to write of England,

Being once perfected how to grant suits,

How to deny them, who t'advance, and who

To trash for overtopping, new created

The creatures that were mine, I say, or chang'd ‘em,

Or else new form' d ‘em, having both the key

Of officer and office, set all hearts i'th'state

To what tune pleased his ear
…
¹

In the year 1500, Europe comprised some 500 or so princely domains, independent cities, and contested territories. By the middle of that century, the princely states that had superseded this rich variety of constitutional forms were already being transformed themselves by the advent of kingly states. Three such states in particular—Sweden, France, and England—embodied this nascent, potential constitutional successor to the princely state. Like Spain, all three had greatly expanded the permanent bureaucracies of the princely states, introducing and maintaining standing armies, and they had centralized taxation specifically directed toward the ability to finance war.
²
As Charles Tilly concluded, European “state structure appeared chiefly as a by-product of rulers' efforts to acquire the means of war.”
³
Not coincidentally these states commenced to codify their civil and criminal laws at this time, a constitutional ramification of the objectified State. The precise state structure that emerged during the period from roughly 1550 to 1660—the kingly state—was only one possibility. The imperial realm, a dynastic conglomeration of princely states, also presented an option. This was the constitutional form pursued by Habsburg Spain. France, whose development of the kingly state set the pattern for all others once it had shown itself to be strategically dynamic and overpowering, provided one constitutional model of the kingly state. Sweden also effected an historic transition from princely to kingly state when Gustavus Adolphus and his gifted minister Oxenstierna collaborated to transform a succession crisis into the consolidation of this new constitutional form. All of this unfolded when strategic developments decisively undermined the constitutional role of the princely state at the end of the century.

In 1494, the year that Charles VIII began his campaign in Italy, he did so at the head of a multinational army,
*
paid regularly by royal finances whose collection and disbursement had been reformed in order to provide a fully stipendiary force in the field for the life of the campaign. “With hindsight we can describe Charles VIII's force as the first ‘modern' army, in that it consisted of the three arms deployed in various mutually supporting tactical combinations, and was very largely made up of men paid from a central treasury.”
⁴

The military lessons that the French invasion had prompted the princes and oligarchs of Italy to learn—the requirement of larger professional
mercenary forces, the need for artillery, new fortress design—were applied by unified Italian administrative organizations supported by consistent finance. When France developed the princely state, however, she could draw on a great national culture, nourished by a vast and contiguous estate that could staff and pay for its bureaucratic apparatus, which in turn provided the mechanisms for raising even greater revenue. It is often said that the Valois successes in the Italian invasion can be attributed to the introduction of mobile artillery, and this is doubtless true. France had no monopoly on the manufacture of artillery, however. (Nor were there many “French” in the French army, it being mainly composed—like the forces of the Italian cities—of foreign mercenaries, chiefly Swiss.) Rather it was a combination of French reforms and the diplomatic paralysis of the Italian cities that led to the inevitable military outcome. In 1494 Charles VIII had moved against Naples, which had a secure dynasty and lay near to many of the richest cities in Europe, of which she was one, and had defeated the Neapolitan forces by February 1495. Initially, each of the neighboring cities had sought to defend its own autonomy rather than unite with Naples. Milan, in fact, gave the French army free passage. Florence revolted against its regime, and the citizens set up a republican government that was in effect a French satellite.

The princely state in Italy had been developed by families who wished to re-enforce their legitimacy to govern, and who required a more efficient means of marshaling wealth in order to defend their claims by means of expensive mercenaries. The kingly state took the Italian constitutional innovation—fundamentally, the objectification of the state—and united this with dynastic legitimacy. The result was a formidable creation that dominated Europe for the next century. Confronting the princely state and the imperial realm as competing constitutional forms, the kingly state proved able to vanquish these forms strategically and, as a consequence, historically. As before, the development of constitutional forms came about in tandem with a revolution in military tactics.

Prior to this period, the progress of operations in war had become increasingly drawn out. The combination of missile fire and rapid movement, so lethally effective at Agincourt in the fifteenth century, had been succeeded in the sixteenth century by the Swiss tactics using massive formations of pike and musket. The Swiss order of battle ranged men in twelve or more rows, practically immobilizing them once deployed. Spain used these tactics for the relentless and terrifying assaults of the
tercio
, a tightly packed rectangle, often fifty files wide and forty ranks deep, whose heart was formed of pikemen wielding fifteen-foot spears, flanked by mus-ketmen (arquebusiers) who protected the formation from cavalry attacks. The armies of which these formations were composed were hardly more
mobile: they depended upon magazines located in fortresses and thus could not stray far or for long from their very limited communications with these fixed points. The fortresses themselves, reconstructed along the lines discussed earlier, could no longer be easily reduced by artillery, which meant that siege campaigns became more drawn out and were themselves a complex logistical process of assembling artillery and stores. Campaigns now came to revolve around sieges, and great battles were seldom fought. Europe appeared to be locked into a situation of military stalemate: a heavily defended fortress sheltering perhaps 10,000 troops had to be seized by an advancing army, but barring surprise (as in the capture of the Dutch towns in 1572 by the Sea Beggars) or treachery (as at Aalst in 1576, where the town was sold by its English garrison to the Spanish), this could be a matter of many months, even years.

The introduction of small arms, which dates to the middle of the six-teenth century, eventually changed this situation and brought a revolution in tactics. Reliance on firepower on the battlefield led not only to a changed role for the cavalry—because infantry now became a potentially decisive force—but also added urgency to the move to larger armies. Such a move depended upon consistent finance, centralized government organization, and logistics planning of a high order. When Michael Roberts coined the phrase “military revolution” to describe these innovations, his characterization became perhaps the single most influential concept in the studies of early modern warfare in Europe.
⁵
He argued not only that these tactical changes were responsible for a dramatic shift in the strategy and scale of warfare, but also for a change in the societies that undertook such warfare.

What was this revolution in tactics and what brought it about? It is associated, at least in its initial appearance, with Maurice of Nassau, who led Europe in the development of a year-round professional force. The Dutch, owing to the great wealth amassed from their maritime trade, were able to afford a standing army. That meant that the state could specify the conditions of training, and this fact actually made possible the revolution in warfare that is associated with Maurice, the Dutch leader.

Maurice's cousin, William Louis of Nassau, wrote him a letter from Groningen dated December 8, 1594—which has been preserved—in which he first suggested the technique of an infantry countermarch. William Louis had just read Aelian's description of a drill practiced by the Roman army; inspired by this account, William Louis suggested that six rotating ranks of musketeers could replicate with gunfire the continuous hail of missiles that the Romans had achieved using javelins and slingshots. By this means, it would be possible to create tidal waves of fire through a coordinated fusillade, replacing individual aiming. Maurice modified the ancient Roman practice by alternating ten ranks in order to
maintain constant musket fire, and the technique of rolling musket volleys soon became the standard battle tactic of European armies.
⁶

This innovation was perhaps as crucial in the transformation of the state during this period as the development of fortresses had been in the previous era, or the use of artillery against fortified cities before then. Muskets capable of piercing armor plate at 100 yards had been introduced earlier in the century, but the rate of fire was torturously slow, owing to the complicated process of reloading. If this problem could be solved, however, muskets promised to remake armies because muskets required little experience to use compared to the long bow and were as effective against cavalry as the pike. Moreover, large tight squares of pikemen made attractive targets for the not-very-accurate muskets.

If the innovation of fortress design had been to take a target—the fortified city—and transform it into a platform for fire, then the Spanish
tercio
did much the same thing for shock: it took infantry otherwise vulnerable to charges from cavalry and made them a sort of gunless prototank, invulnerable and inexorable. These slow-moving formations would crush anything in their way, unless it was another such massive square, in which case neither side would gain a decisive advantage. Battles tended therefore, like sieges, toward stalemate. The tactics of the period provided no effective means of penetrating this type of defense in depth.

Maurice, however, saw

In the armies that adopted this innovation—the forces of the anti-Habsburg coalition—the infantry was deployed in shallower, more linear firing formations that allowed for more tactical flexibility than did the
tercio
, with its massive squares of infantry composed of central blocks of pikemen forty to sixty soldiers deep, encased on all sides by deep sleeves of musketeers who protected them from assault. To perfect these tactics, intricate drills were practiced in order to speed up the rate of fire until Gus-tavus Adolphus introduced a variation that concentrated fire on massive simultaneous volleys by multiple ranks, opening up the opposing pike formation to a cavalry charge. While Spanish cavalry were still practicing the traditional
caracole
—in which successive ranks of horsemen charged
toward an enemy line, fired their handguns and then wheeled off to the flanks—Swedish cavalry restored the attack with the saber, directly charging into those ranks decimated by a focused musket volley.

These innovations required a great degree of control by the commander, a prerequisite of which is discipline in the ranks. “It was discipline and not gunpowder,” Max Weber concluded, “which initiated the transformation. [G]unpowder and all the war techniques associated with it became significant only with the existence of discipline.”
⁸
That in turn was only possible with forces that were constituted over a long term, were constantly drilled, and sought their identity in the professional esteem of the corps, rather than the glory of feudal knights or the personal enrichment of mercenaries. This required a state apparatus, but not just any sort of state. Rothenberg reminds us that, up to this time,

Therefore, when Maurice of Nassau attempted to exploit the use of infantry firepower through a technique that put a premium on fast arming, he introduced further innovations, which required standardization in weaponry and the extensive training of troops. Only thorough practice could train troops to withstand the terror of cavalry charges without losing their nerve and either breaking and running, or at the very least disrupting the complicated rhythm of the volley and permitting themselves to be assaulted at close quarters. When Gustavus Adolphus adopted these tactics, putting his troops in line (rather than in the classic squares that had dominated European battlefields), he changed their tactical mission. By teaching his forces to use a countermarch in which musketeers rotated their positions by slowly moving through the ranks of their own men, moving backward to reload, then moving forward through stationary reloaders, he enabled his line to take the offensive rather than being forced to remain static. These tactics had the effect of restoring the infantry to its status as a battle-winning force and reducing the significance of the artillery-encrusted bastioned fortresses. Such tactics, however, required the continuity of substantial forces in being. Only a standing army would have the professionalism to execute such complicated and harrowing tactics. Roberts argued that these standing armies tended to enhance monarchical power, and militarize the nobility as well as much of the general populace through conscription. Thus there was, he argued, a mutually reinforcing
relationship between the professionalization of the military required by these tactical innovations and the rise of the kingly state. Roberts wrote that “the new principle of concentrating military power under the absolute control of the sovereign” was a consequence of “the transformation in the scale of war [that] led inevitably to an increase in the authority of the state… Only the state, now, could supply the administrative, technical, and financial resources required for large-scale hostilities.”
¹⁰
Speaking of this period, William McNeill concurred that “new weaponry began to favor larger states and more powerful monarchs,” and he referred to the “centralizing effects of the new technology of war.”
¹¹
As Jeremy Black has observed of Roberts's thesis,