Armies still had their armored cavalry (some of them knights), but the heavy cavalry had to be supported by good infantry and artillery. Artillery could include crossbows, longbows, hand guns, and for sieges, cannons. (Illustrations in class.)
By the 14th century, princes who raised armies seldom relied on the customary obligations of either nobles or commoners to fill out the ranks. Commanders wanted as many trained, full-time warriors as they could get, and they knew that they had to pay. Armies were thus assembled through contracts: contracts with mercenary captains (as in Italy) or with the important barons to raise troops (as in England), which would also be paid through subcontracts. Raising armies involved high finance.
In the late 15th century and in the early 16th century, war became more complicated, more expensive, and simply larger all the way around. One influential scholar, Geoffrey Parker, has characterized this as a sudden "military revolution;" Bert Hall believes that change was more incremental. No one doubts, however, that there were a lot of significant changes in the way war was fought, and that it had a lot of effect on politics and society, even off the battlefield.
Artillery: About 1450, cannons became bigger and more effective. The chief use of cannon was against castles, towns, and other military strongpoints. During most of the Middle Ages, possession of such strongpoints were the key to successful warfare, and the defense thus had the advantage, if it was at all organized. Cannons made strongpoints vulnerable, and an arms race to develop offensive and defensive artillery resulted.
Infantry: During the 14th century, the effectiveness of well-trained, high-moral infantry, even against the best noble cavalry, was established without doubt. During the 15th century, good infantry formations, using pikes in a phalanx formation (not that different from those used by Alexander the Great) were becoming a necessity. The Swiss, who beat Charles the Bold in the 1470s inspired everyone else in Europe to imitate them. The fact that such troops were cheaper to equip and maintain than armored cavalry made them attractive, too. In the sixteenth century effective handguns were mixed in with the pikes, and these added to the fearsomeness of the infantry fortification.
Finance: The most successful rulers of Europe around 1500 (especially in France, Spain, the Low Countries and England) were richer, more able to tax their subjects than their predecessors. A period of economic and population expansion had arrived.
So at the beginning of the 16th century, rulers were raising bigger armies, and armies of a different sort. The availability of money and the relative ease of raising infantry encouraged them to expand their forces.
These forces were needed to subdue strongpoints, however, and this proved not to be cheap.
Fortresses were being rebuilt (itself a very expensive undertaking) to resist outside cannon fire on one hand, and to provide gun platforms for defensive cannon on the other. Sieges proved to be just as difficult in the new conditions as they had been in the pre-cannon era. To take a town or fortress, huge trench systems had to be constructed and manned for prolonged periods of time.
Both the size and expense of armies grew dramatically. (after J.R. Hale)
Date and country Single armies Total forces
| Mid-15th c., a powerful state | ------------- | 10-20,000 |
| 15th c., Spanish campaigns | c. 40,000 (exceptional) | |
| 1500 | 30,000 | ----------- |
| 1530s | 45,000-100,000 | ----------- |
| 1552 Charles V (in the Empire) | 50,000 | 150,000 |
I've mentioned that someof the powerful states of the 15th century were small ones -- Milan, Florence. As a result of these developments, they lost ground to big states like France.
The expense, in a time of expansion and overall price inflation, grew dramatically, too. A major French campaign of 1515 cost 1.8 million livres tournois; one of 1554 cost 13.275 million. (Again thanks to J.R. Hale.) And costs continued to go up in the later 16th c.
Larger powers could pay the game of war more easily, given their larger tax revenues, and this encouraged consolidation of political power. However, no one, no matter how powerful, could afford to pay for war out of normal revenue. War always had to be fought on credit, on the nopes the results would justify the expense. And as a result, armies were far more precarious and therefore less useful than their masters hoped.
(Discussion of the raising of armies, through the intermediary of the mercenary captain, in class. Armies were ad hoc organizations.)
Though princes hoped for great profit (of some sort) from war, and their captains were subcontractors hoping for a profit from their companies, and common soldiers generally joined for some hope of a better future (sometimes just to avoid starvation), they were all often disappointed. From the emperor to the common soldier, people were constantly out of pocket. The greatest rulers often went bankrupt, which wiped out their debts but made it very difficult to raise new money to maintain the existing armies. The war effort stalled, until some new expedient could be found. But this did not mean that the destruction of war ceased.
Even when pay and supplies disappeared, armies seldom broke up. The armies were huge communities (the size of major cities) and most people in them had no place to go. Armies tried to stick together.
The initial impulse was to try to live off the land. This was not very practical -- Princes supplied their armies because they knew how quickly plundering would exhaust the area around their army. However, an army with no supplies coming in would steal, or better extort contributions from local communities.
If pay and supplies still did not come through, the common soldiers might eventually mutiny. They would refuse to follow orders, leave camp, or fight the enemy unless they were attacked. Soldiers were usually treated very badly, and a time of mutiny was in some ways an emotional high, a chance at self-assertian. When their demands for back pay were met, they would go out and fight bravely just to prove to the world that the mutiny had nothing to do with cowardice. (A fourteenth-century account of an English army mutiny in Portugal gives some idea of the psychology involved.)
Early modern armies were wonderfully destructive, but they were very blunt instruments of policy indeed. The only way that the major wars of the 16th century could be waged at all was by the massive offloading of costs -- on taxpayers, investors who lost money by default, captains and soldiers who never had to be paid because they were killed first, and the people in the way of the armies who lost life and properties.
This military activity is often seen as the beginning of the modern state. Undoubtedly the lead in the military revolution was taken the stronger states of the period, and some of the financial and administrative needs of states at war promoted further centralization. However, the expense of war also lead to decentralization, as rulers' debt problems force them to make conscessions to lenders, nobles, deputies, and sometimes even ordinary subjects.
We can see this in the case of Castile. In 1520, Charles V destroyed urban resistance to his tax demands, and with the help of the Castilian nobles used its men and resources to finance his European wars. Huge taxes and other burdens were laid on Castile. By 1600, despite the influx of American silver in Philip II's reign, Castile was taxed out, and lands, tax exemptions and royal powers had been liberally distributed to nobles who would work or fight for the crown. As a result, Castile was less subject to direct royal authority than it had been a few decades earlier. Throughout the 17th century, the power of the Castilian crown and Spain's place in the world continued to decline.
This cycle of warfare, initial gains followed by longterm decline is
one we will see more than once in this course.
Copyright (C) 1999, Steven Muhlberger.