War: What is it good for? (29 page)

The supply side was crucial to this rapid diffusion. After their brutal thirteenth-century conquests, the Mongol khans created something of a Pax Mongolica on the steppes, which traders exploited to move goods from one end of Eurasia to the other. Marco Polo was merely the most famous of these merchants. By carryi ng around goods (above all, silk) and ideas (especially Christianity), they tied East and West together; by carryi ng microbes (the Black Death), they also brought disaster to all. But of all the blessings and curses they carried, none was quite as important as the gun.

That said, the demand side was also important. Europeans were more enthusiastic about guns than anyone else on earth, immediately seeing ways to use them and throwing themselves into making improvements. In 1331, just five years after the first reference to firearms at Florence, other Italians were using cannons in sieges. In 1372, guns actually breached city walls in France.

Something remarkable was happening. Innovation in gun use slowed in East Asia after about 1350, but in Europe it only accelerated. As demand grew, Europeans invented new ways to mine saltpeter, cutting its cost in half by the 1410s. Metalworkers responded by making bigger, cheaper wrought-iron guns that used more powder and could fire heavier cannonballs, and in the seven years after Agincourt, English gunners showed
heavy artillery's value by blasting the stone castles of Normandy into gravel.

Their experiences also underlined the drawbacks of big guns, though. While they were fine for sieges, huge bombards were so heavy to move and slow to fire that they were basically useless on battlefields. Even if an army could drag its cannons into position, after firing a single shot, the guns could be overrun by cavalry long before they could be reloaded. It was no accident that despite using a dozen big guns to batter Harfleur into submission in 1415, Henry V took none to Agincourt itself.

Within twenty years, the restless minds of artillerymen had hit on a brilliantly simple solution. Followers of the Czech religious rebel Jan Hus made dozens of small cannons and lashed them to wagons. They then pulled
the wagons to the battlefield and chained them together, creating a miniature, mobile fortress (usually called by the Dutch word
laager
). The guns fired just as slowly as ever, but now pike- and swordsmen behind the wagons could hold off charging horsemen until the cannons were ready to shoot again.

In 1444 laager tactics almost caused a major military upset. For a century and a half, the Ottomans—one of the many groups of Turkic steppe warriors that had migrated into the lucky latitudes during the Middle Ages—had been expanding from their base in Anatolia. After overrunning most of the Balkans, their mounted archers now threatened Hungary. The pope declared a crusade, and a Christian coalition (including a Transylvanian contingent led by the brother of Vlad “the Impaler” Dracul) blocked the Turks' path at Varna in modern-day Bulgaria.

The Turks were the best soldiers in Europe and outnumbered their enemies two to one, so the battle should have been a walkover. But as wave after wave of Ottoman riders were shot down trying to break into the Christian laager, Turkish morale began to crack. For a moment the battle hung in the balance, and had the young Hungarian king not decided to charge into the heart of the Turkish line and get himself and five hundred knights killed, the Ottoman advance might actually have been stopped.

As it was, the Ottomans not only swallowed up Hungary but also drew the right lessons from this close-run thing. They began hiring Christian gunners and by 1448 were ready to turn laager tactics back against the Hungarians. Another five years after that, a Hungarian gunnery expert on the Ottoman payroll deployed dozens of medium-sized cannons to pound holes in the walls of Constantinople, ending the Byzantine Empire.

And still the improvements kept coming. Europeans learned to moisten gunpowder, leaving it to dry into granules (“corns”) that exploded much more fiercely. At first no cannons were strong enough to contain the force of corned powder, but by the 1470s an arms race between France and Burgundy produced shorter guns with thicker barrels, using corned powder to fire iron rather than stone balls. Hungarians found a different use for the stronger powder, putting tiny amounts into handheld guns called arquebuses (“hook guns,” so called after a hook used to reduce recoil).

The new weapons got a spectacular trial run in 1494. That year the French king, Charles VIII, obsessed with launching a crusade to take back the Holy Land, took it into his head that invading Italy was the logical first step. In most ways his campaign was a disaster, but it showed that the new guns had revolutionized war. With a few dozen up-to-date, lightweight
cannons, Charles blew away everything in his path. For centuries, losers on the battlefield had always had the option of hiding in a castle and hoping to sit out the resulting siege, but Italians now learned (as Machiavelli, who lived through the war, put it) that “no wall exists, however thick, that artillery cannot destroy in a few days.”

The first result was a spike in the number of battles, because any army that yielded the open countryside and retreated to its fortresses was now bound to lose. Between 1495 and 1525, western Europeans fought a dozen major engagements, a rate unprecedented since antiquity. But over the next decades that changed, as advances in offense called forth defensive responses. Europeans now abandoned the high stone walls that had held attackers at bay since the days of prehistoric Jericho. Instead, they raised low, sloping earth banks that deflected or absorbed cannonballs. The new walls were easier for infantry to climb over, but the solution to this problem was also to hand. “Our first care,” Machiavelli observed around 1520, “is to make our walls crooked … [so] that if the Enemy attempts to approach, he may be opposed and repulsed just as well in the flank as in the front.”

Over the next century, expensive new walls, shaped like starfish and studded with projecting ravelins, bastions, and hornworks, spread across Europe. With defeated armies again able to retreat into impregnable fastnesses, battles abruptly lost their appeal. Between 1534 and 1631, western Europeans hardly ever risked head-on clashes, and when they did do so, it was usually while one side was trying to relieve a siege. “We make war more like foxes, than like lyons,” said an English soldier, “and you will have twenty sieges for one battell.”

It all sounds like another Red Queen story, with Europeans running faster and faster just to stay in place, pouring out blood and gold on increasingly terrible but ultimately pointless wars. Yet as in the case of the invention of fortifications, metal arms and armor, and all the other ancient revolutions in military affairs that we saw in
Chapter 2
, nothing could be further from the truth. Western Europeans could not outpace each other, but they did pull ahead of everyone else on the planet.

For centuries, Europeans had been on the defensive against Mongols, Turks, and other invaders. The fall of Constantinople in 1453 sent shock waves through the continent, and in 1529 a Turkish army reached the gates of Vienna. A generation later, Europe's prospects looked darker still. “Can we doubt what the result must be,” the leading European negotiator in Constantinople gloomily asked himself, on comparing Christendom's “empty treasury, luxurious habits, exhausted resources, [and] broken spirits” with
the Turks' “unimpaired resources, experience and practice in arms, veteran soldiery, [and] uninterrupted sequence of victories”?

To most people's surprise, it turned out that the answer was yes. Even as the ambassador was writing, the military balance of power was shifting Europe's way. In 1600, the Turkish commander in Hungary gloomily reported that “most of the troops of these accursed ones [that is, Christians] are on foot and arquebusiers. Most of the troops of Islam are horsemen, and not only are their infantrymen few, but experts in the use of the arquebus are rare. For this reason, there is great trouble in battles and sieges.”

Europeans had been steadily increasing the numbers of gunners in their armies for a century. The trend accelerated after the 1550s, when Spaniards introduced a new kind of handgun, the musket, which threw a two-ounce lead ball hard enough to pierce plate armor a hundred paces away. In the 1520s, infantry with edged weapons—pikes, swords, halberds—had typically outnumbered arquebusiers three to one, but a century later the ratio of shot to pike had been reversed. Cavalry, its medieval dominance over, had been relegated to scouting, skirmishing, and guarding the flanks. Horsemen rarely made up more than one-tenth of a seventeenth-century army.

And so we have yet another paradox. Around 1415, the Mongols and Ming China had the most powerful armies on earth, and Henry V and the other kings of Europe lagged far behind. By 1615—and perhaps even by 1515—that was turning around, and few armies in the world could have stood against European firepower. Europeans had got the top guns, and Asians, who had invented gunnery, had not.

Why did China not keep its early lead in firearms and go on to wage its own Five Hundred Years' War on the world? This is probably the single most important question in the whole of military history, but there is little agreement on the answer.

The most popular theory, versions of which we have encountered in earlier chapters, is that Europeans were the beneficiaries of a unique Western way of war. They had inherited it from ancient Greece, and it was responsible for their gunpowder revolution. “The critical point about firearms and explosives is not that they suddenly gave Western armies hegemony,” the military historian Victor Davis Hanson suggests, “but that such weapons were produced in quality and great numbers in Western rather than in non-European countries—a fact that is ultimately explained by a longstanding Western cultural stance toward rationalism, free inquiry, and the
dissemination of knowledge that has its roots in classical antiquity.” Europe's takeoff, he concludes, was “logical given the Hellenic origins of European civilization.”

At this stage in the book, you will not be surprised to hear that I am unconvinced. I tried to show in
Chapter 2
that there was no such thing as an ancient Western way of war, because the ways Greeks and Romans fought were not uniquely Western. They were just the local (Mediterranean) versions of a pattern found all across the Eurasian lucky latitudes, which we might call the productive way of war. I went on in
Chapter 3
to argue that everywhere from China to the Mediterranean this ancient productive way of war unraveled in the first millennium
A.D.
in the face of the rise of cavalry. If these claims are correct, then Hanson's suggestion that continuities in the Western way of war explain Europe's gunpowder takeoff must be incorrect, and when we look closely at what happened in sixteenth-century Europe, there is just too much that the Western way of war theory does not explain.

Other historians have gone into detail on this, so I will concentrate on just a couple of issues. If it is really the case that “it is this Western desire for a single, magnificent collision of infantry, for brutal killing with edged weapons on a battlefield between free men, that has baffled and terrified our adversaries from the non-Western world for more than 2,500 years” (Hanson's words), why was the new European style of fighting all about standing at a distance and firing guns rather than closing to use edged weapons? If the Western way of war has always been about “the absolute destruction of the enemy's forces in the field” and “the
desire
to deliver fatal blows and then steadfastly to endure, without retreat, any counter response,” why did Europeans fight so few battles in the century between 1534 and 1631? And why, if “for the past 2,500 years … there has been a peculiar practice of Western warfare, a common foundation and continual way of fighting, that has made Europeans the most deadly soldiers in the history of fighting,” had Europeans spent a whole millennium—from roughly
A.D.
500 through 1500—in general retreat before raiders and invaders from Asia and North Africa?

Some historians propose a very down-to-earth answer to all these questions. Europe's firearms revolution, they argue, had nothing to do with cultural traditions: Europeans simply got good with guns because they fought a lot. Europe, the theory runs, was divided into lots of little states that were always at each other's throats. China, by contrast, was a unified empire for most of the time between 1368 and 1911. As a result, the
Chinese rarely fought and had little reason to invest in improving guns. For the feuding Europeans, however, investing in better guns was literally a matter of life and death. Therefore it was Europeans, not Chinese, who perfected the gun.

But this too leaves important questions unanswered. Despite its unity, China fought a lot between 1368 and 1911, often on a scale that dwarfed Europe's squabbles. In 1411 and again in 1449, emperors sent armies half a million strong against the Mongols. Fighting against pirates filled much of the sixteenth century, a terrible struggle with Japan devastated the Korean peninsula in the 1590s, and in 1600 a quarter of a million men were mobilized against a revolt in Sichuan. So why did none of these wars spur European-type innovations in firearms?

The real issue, the historian turned attorney Kenneth Chase explains in his magnificent book
Firearms: A Global History to 1700,
was not how many but what kinds of wars Europeans and Asians fought. The first guns were clumsy, slow things, their rates of fire measured in minutes per shot rather than shots per minute. They only really worked against clumsy, slow targets, such as city walls, which is why the first great advances were in siege artillery.

The hotbed of innovation was initially southern China, because the wars against the Mongol overlords of the mid-fourteenth-century Yangzi Valley would be won by storming fortresses and sinking big ships fighting in the constrained space of a river. For both these jobs, early guns were excellent. But when the fighting ended in 1368, the main theater of war shifted to the steppes in northern China. Here there were few forts to bombard, and slow-firing guns were useless against fast-moving cavalry. Chinese generals, being rational men, spent their money on extra horsemen and a great wall rather than incremental improvements in firearms.