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HISTORIOGRAPHY

The historiography of early modern warfare has been shaped for the last fifty years by debate surrounding the concept of a "military revolution." The attraction of such a thesis for many historians stems, paradoxically, from the extent to which it transcends a purely military perspective and presents warfare as a transforming force, acting upon social and political institutions.

A MILITARY REVOLUTION IN EARLY MODERN EUROPE

The original argument for a "military revolution" in early modern Europe was presented by a historian of Sweden, Michael Roberts, who started from the proposition that between 1560 and 1660 initiatives in tactics and troop deployment sought to exploit gunpowder weaponry more effectively. Armies identified with these initiatives abandoned the mass and depth of traditional infantry formations. Instead musketeers were deployed in shallow, linear formations that maximized firepower, while interspersed groups of pikemen protected them from attack. Difficulties in controlling and coordinating infantry formations extended in shallow lines led the reformers to adopt smaller, more manageable units. The Dutch "battalion" or Swedish "squadron," models for these reformed armies, typically contained 500–550 men compared to the traditional infantry formation of 1,500–2,000. The risk that smaller units would be swept aside in hand-to-hand engagement with traditional formations was counteracted—notably in the case of the Swedish army under its royal commander, Gustavus II Adolphus (ruled 1611–1632)—by associating them in coordinated and mutually supportive deep deployment, making use of multiple lines to contain enemy assaults and reinforce the units of the front rank. These deployments also permitted the infantry to aspire to that elusive goal of tacticians, combining massed firepower with offensive strength. Interlocking squadrons rendered the Swedish "push of pike" as formidable as traditional, massed infantry formations. If the central concern of the military reformers was with the infantry, cavalry and artillery were not neglected. It was Gustavus Adolphus again who recognized that the main value of cavalry lay in shock and mass, not in complex maneuvers allowing mounted troops to discharge pistols at enemy formations. More numerous, lighter artillery was also to be deployed on the battlefield in close coordination with the other arms, and it was to be used in a continuous supporting role.

These arguments about tactical change would not necessarily have excited wider historical interest. The key to Roberts's thesis is the claim that new tactics broke a previous stalemate of indecisive, limited warfare. Instead of standoffs and campaigns of maneuver, strategy was now influenced by the possibility of annihilating the enemy in battle and imposing peace from a position of outright military superiority. Strategies changed; rulers and commanders became more ambitious and less compromising in waging war. But these grander strategies could only be achieved by larger armies. If war was now more decisive and fought for higher stakes, it was essential to increase the number of troops in the campaign, whether to provide numerical superiority in battle, to ensure that successes could be followed up, or to contain defeats. In the aftermath of the victory at Breitenfeld (1631) Roberts describes a Swedish army swollen by recruitment to 175,000 men and undertaking a vast strategy to remodel the religious and political structures of the Holy Roman Empire. If these larger armies were to adopt the tactical innovations that provided overwhelming battlefield advantages, they needed more rigorous systems of drill and discipline. Soldiers were to be drilled in use of weapons and group maneuvers by constant practice at the hands of trained noncommissioned and subaltern officers. This could not be achieved by raw recruits overnight; a progressively higher proportion of armies had to serve permanently.

Larger and more permanent armies needed to be paid for, and they needed to be recruited, maintained, and controlled more effectively. European rulers had traditionally raised armies through ad hoc mechanisms that were partly feudal and partly contractual but respected the social and political structures of their states. Local elites contributed their organizational and financial resources to raising troops in return for the right to command and control them. But as the size of armies was ratcheted upwards, only a central administration could absorb the burden of mass recruitment, and only a centralized and more powerful financial administration could sustain the costs of warfare on this new scale. Once this more sophisticated administration was put in place—and backed by a considerably larger permanent army—the coercive potential of the state increased exponentially. If ordinary subjects resented paying ever higher taxes, and local elites objected to systems of centralized control that excluded them from power, the state now had the strength to sweep both aside.

A permanent army implied an increasingly professional officer corps. While some officerships would continue to be occupied by the traditional nobility, others, notably in the artillery or the bulk of the infantry, were open to the sons of new nobles or bourgeois, according to talent. Such officers acquired not just paid employment but social prestige in a society whose financial and administrative raison d'être became the maintenance of permanent armed forces. This process of militarization reached down into society as the struggle to maintain larger permanent forces could be resolved only through systems of conscription. The political, administrative, and social consequences of "military revolution" appeared momentous: changes in the character of warfare were to sweep away a traditional political culture dominated by the bonds of locality and social hierarchy, replacing them with the centralized modern state, existing for and underpinned by the military.

HISTORIOGRAPHICAL DIVERGENCES

Michael Roberts's skillful linking of changes on the battlefield with some of the most fundamental political and social transformations in European history has ensured that his thesis has enjoyed great influence. It has not, however, passed without criticism, and revisionism since the 1980s has taken issue with almost every aspect of the "military revolution."

Chronological problems. It is questionable whether a "revolution" in military affairs spread over a full century has any real meaning. Other changes that fundamentally altered the nature of warfare—the breech-loading rifle, the machine gun, the ironclad warship—had a notably more rapid and specific impact than the tactical evolution described by Roberts. And precisely because of the indeterminacy of this evolution, historians have argued that even the century from 1560 to 1660 is a truncation of a more extensive process.

If the driving force behind military change is taken to be the emergence and development of more effective gunpowder weapons, then a starting date of 1560 appears arbitrary, indeed incomprehensible. If there was a "gunpowder revolution" in European warfare, it lay in the decades between 1450 and 1530. Technologically, the long period that follows is marked by little change in either artillery or infantry firearms. The development of better and much cheaper gunpowder had been a feature of the later fifteenth century, as had credible cast-iron artillery. Conversely, the crude technology, poor range, and inaccuracy of the matchlock infantry firearm remained little changed between the early sixteenth and late seventeenth centuries.

In the matter of infantry tactics, European commanders and theorists were wrestling with problems of combining infantry firearms and thrusting weapons throughout the sixteenth century, and here again, a number of historians have pointed out the fallacy of attributing dramatic success to a particular sequence of practitioners within a circumscribed chronology. Geoffrey Parker has emphasized that Spanish armies from the early sixteenth century onward were the most innovative in their experiments to try to combine infantry firearms, defensive capacity, and offensive mass in their infantry units.

If doubt has been cast upon a series of military changes claimed to start in 1560, historians have also questioned the end date of 1660. Indeed Jeremy Black has contrasted the stagnation of the century down to 1660 with the radical tactical and organizational changes occurring in the following century. The development of the ring bayonet finally permitted the phasing out of the pike in favor of infantry units entirely equipped with firearms and possessing their own defensive capability. The introduction of cartridges, which prepackaged shot and a charge of powder, and the mass production of a reliable flintlock musket, were equally important. The musket was no longer fired by means of a separate length of smoldering match, and infantry could be packed into a genuinely close order. All of these changes ensured that the killing power of infantry was dramatically increased, opening the way to a further reduction of the depth of formations, which by the 1740s–1750s were deployed in the three ranks that remained typical up to and beyond the Napoleonic Wars.

Whereas there is ambiguity about the growth in troop numbers during the century of the military revolution (see below), there is none for the period after 1660. By the 1690s France was maintaining around 340,000 troops in combat, and a battle such as Steenkirk (1692) set 57,000 French troops against 70,000 allies. The scale of warfare after 1660 moves into a league that was entirely unprecedented and would remain relatively constant until the wars following 1792.

If the original chronology of 1560–1660 looks too extensive for claims to a "revolution" in warfare, subsequent historians have thus added to the problem. One response, proposed by a historian of Poland, Robert Frost, is to argue that there was no single military revolution, but a plethora of separate military revolutions, separated both chronologically and by the military needs and cultures of different European nations; what might be deemed obsolete on the battlefields of the Spanish Netherlands—the massed cavalry charge, for example—remained central to tactics in eastern Europe. Another approach, advanced by an historian of medieval warfare, Clifford Rogers, questions whether "revolution" is an appropriate concept for understanding a process such as military change. Rogers proposes an alternative model, derived from the theory of "punctuated equilibrium" in evolutionary biology, in which rapid technological and organizational changes in warfare may provide short-term advantages but are then either absorbed by all those involved in warfare or neutralized by specific counter-developments, after which the military system once again assumes a modified equilibrium.

Conceptual issues. An early and major challenge to Michael Roberts's thesis was offered by Geoffrey Parker, who questioned whether the battlefield was the appropriate locus for the military transformation of early modern Europe. He suggested instead that the discussion had neglected the more fundamental role of siege warfare. Developments in artillery rendered obsolete traditional medieval fortifications based on tall curtain walls. Early experiences of this vulnerability stimulated experiments with systems of fortification, the so-called trace italienne, which relied upon low-lying, earth-packed walls, whose faces were defended by triangular, projecting bastions from which defending artillery and muskets could sweep the approaches. The result of this development was stalemate; it became almost impossible to take these fortifications by bombardment, and sieges became drawn-out blockades. Yet commanders, justifiably doubting the capacity of troops to make decisive progress in a field campaign, seized upon the capture of fortresses or fortified cities as strategic targets. Such sieges required ever increasing numbers of troops, both to secure the blockade and to make good the losses from wounds, disease, and desertion. European warfare and all of its political and social consequences were determined by attritional sieges, not by tactical and strategic revolution.

Examination of warfare in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries raises more questions about the "military revolution." The significance of firearms in a period of matchlock muskets and unstandardized and cumbersome artillery can easily be overestimated. Commanders and theorists who continued to favor mass and cohesion in infantry tactics were not necessarily anachronistic. Historians have drawn attention to the persistence of debates about infantry deployment up to the end of the eighteenth century, indicating that claims to have achieved a tactical panacea in the early seventeenth century look premature. The Battle of Nördlingen (1634) has become a touchstone for skeptics. Not only was this one of the two or three most decisive battles of the Thirty Years' War, but it saw the annihilation, at the hands of traditional Spanish and imperial forces, of the Swedish army that was heir to the tactical and strategic principles of Gustavus Adolphus. The frequency of military success by armies that were not identified as the originators or sponsors of military change gives cause for reflection. One conclusion from the experience of battle is that a key factor in success was the presence of veteran troops. Armies able to maintain significant numbers of long-serving troops, regardless of tactical deployment, were likely to gain the advantage, whether in battle or in protracted siege warfare. When forces with significant numbers of veterans in their ranks encountered each other, the outcome would tend to be bloody and indecisive, unless one force, as with the Swedes at Nördlingen, made a major tactical error.

The next stage of the argument, that tactical success could lead to a widening of strategic vision, has also been scrutinized. The missing factor here, critics have maintained, is logistics. Ambitious warwinning strategies may require the defeat of the enemy, but this will only be achieved if armies can be fed and supplied. It is clear that systems of supply, transportation, and distribution were inadequate throughout the period down to 1660 to sustain large-scale strategies. By prioritizing supply over strategic goals, small armies might extract subsistence locally, but such forces were ill adapted to winning wars. A picture of massive armies destroying opposing forces through their tactical superiority and then rolling forward onto enemy territory simply ignores the insuperable contemporary problems of supply.

Other conceptual criticisms of the "military revolution" take issue with those features that nonmilitary historians have always found most compelling. The increasing size of armies—for whatever reason—is assumed to be the catalyst for the developing fiscal and administrative mechanisms of the state. But here a number of historians have raised questions about the actual scale of military increase in the period up to 1660. Armies of twenty to thirty thousand were attained by states waging war before 1500. The total military establishments of the great powers moved up toward forty to fifty thousand by the 1540s–1550s, and this appears to have marked a plateau of military effort. Alone among the European states, the Spanish monarchy of Philip II (ruled 1556–1598) may have maintained seventy to eighty thousand men by the 1580s. No other power was capable of rivaling an establishment on this scale, and it was not until the Thirty Years' War that some of the belligerents could claim that their total forces surpassed this. And if the imperial army under the generalship of Albrecht von Wallenstein (1583–1634) could claim to have over 100,000 men under arms, and Gustavus Adolphus was reported briefly to have had as many as 175,000 men, other military establishments—including the imperial and the Swedish for most of the war—remained well below 100,000 men. Despite traditional claims for an army of 150,000, the reality of the French war effort during the 1630s and 1640s is nearer half that number. Moreover a contrast between the total military establishments of the belligerents and the actual size of campaign armies is still more revealing. To all intents the maximum force that could operate in a campaign theater remained at thirty thousand until the latter decades of the seventeenth century. Most of the specific campaigns and battles of the Thirty Years' War took place with far fewer troops on either side; engagements with more than twenty thousand combatants in each army were rare. This was no larger than the battles of the Italian wars, a century earlier.

These less impressive increases in numbers raise obvious questions about a necessary transformation of the fiscal and administrative mechanisms of the state. The questions are reinforced by recognition that increases in the size of armies did not require a growth in centralizing state power. The disparity between overall military establishments and the modest "cutting edge" of the campaign armies in the Thirty Years' War hints at a more fundamental issue. Military expansion from the 1520s was largely met by contracting out responsibility for the recruitment and maintenance of soldiers. By 1558 a French military establishment of around fifty thousand troops was composed of 70 percent foreign mercenaries.

Although large-scale mercenary contracts initially implied only administrative decentralization, from the later sixteenth century and the Thirty Years' War they were also fueled by fiscal delegation. Mercenary contractors would reimburse themselves through "contributions," war taxes extracted under direct threat of military force. Bigger armies did not mean more extensive central state structures; bigger armies in fact came into being to facilitate the extraction of contributions and other forms of plunder and extortion. Far from being synonymous with the growth of absolute monarchies and centralized administrations, war encouraged a retreat by the state from many of its essential functions. Even where states had retained some degree of control over government or fiscality, the tendency was not to tighten this, but to market it. Desperate for cash to maintain those parts of the war effort that still fell under their responsibility, governments such as that of France under Cardinals Richelieu (in power 1624–1642) and Mazarin (in power 1643–1661) launched into an orgy of short-term fiscal expedients, most resulting in the confirmation or multiplication of existing privileges and fiscal exemptions and a huge increase of proprietary office holding.

Such comprehensive skepticism about one of the central planks of the original military revolution thesis, the link between war and state formation, finds support in recent work on early modern absolutism. Traditionally, absolutism was portrayed as the triumph of centralized, bureaucratic structures over societies made up of multiple layers of personal, provincial, and institutional privilege. Revisionist historians have questioned whether it was practical, or in any sense the intention of these regimes, to exclude traditional elites from government and its institutions. Indeed the efficacy of socalled absolutist states in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries stemmed, it is argued, not from exclusion of the elites, but from more self-conscious and deliberate collaboration with them. By maintaining or rebuilding close relations with the elites, based upon respect for their fiscal and juridical privileges, and by ensuring that they retained access and promotion within key institutions, notably the army, the European states of the later seventeenth century set the stage for massive military expansion. In both Brandenburg-Prussia and Russia state service, for the most part in the military, was a positive obligation upon the established nobility, though one that offered promotional prospects and status. Elsewhere political and social pressures ensured that the officer corps was dominated by traditional elites. The armies of the eighteenth century were a potent symbol of the power of the state, but this was a direct product of compromises with the privileged. If particular rulers—Peter the Great of Russia (ruled 1682–1725), Charles XII of Sweden (1697–1718), Frederick II of Prussia (1740–1786)—seemed able to obscure this compromise and to deploy their armies and their states' resources in pursuit of untrammeled dynastic ambition, the underlying reality of armies as virtual joint stock companies reasserted itself with regularity throughout the eighteenth century.

These different emphases in studying the relationship between rulers, states, and armies in early modern Europe have done much to strand an unmodified "military revolution" thesis in a historiographical backwater. A productive recent development has been more systematic study of the effects of European military technology and organization beyond the Continent. Historians have given much more attention to the impact of European armies and warfare in non-European contexts. Was there a "Western way of war"? How did the Europeans capitalize on their military advantages in a colonial context? Perhaps most interesting, to what extent did non-European states on their own initiative replicate some of the organizational and technical changes associated with early modern European warfare? In other cases, how quickly and how effectively did non-European states adopt the characteristics of European warfare, and what impact did this have upon their own political and social organization?

See also Absolutism; Engineering: Military; Firearms; State and Bureaucracy; Thirty Years' War (1618–1648).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adams, Simon. "Tactics or Politics? The 'Military Revolution' and the Habsburg Hegemony, 1525–1648." In Tools of War: Instruments, Ideals and Institutions of Warfare, 1445–1871. Edited by John A. Lynn. Urbana, Ill., 1990. Reprinted in Rogers, The Military Revolution Debate (see below).

Beik, William. Absolutism and Society in Seventeenth-Century France: State Power and Provincial Aristocracy in Languedoc. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1985. The classic revisionist case study of absolutism as a compromise between the central regime and provincial elites.

Bérenger, Jean, ed. La révolution militaire en Europe (XVe– XVIIIe siècles). Paris, 1998.

Black, Jeremy. A Military Revolution? Military Change and European Society, 1550–1800. Basingstoke, U.K., 1991.

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Parker, Geoffrey. "The 'Military Revolution, 1560–1660'—a Myth?" Journal of Modern History 48, no. 2 (June 1976): 195–214. Reprinted in Parker's Spain and the Netherlands, 1559–1659: Ten Studies (London, 1979), and in Rogers, The Military Revolution Debate.

——. The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500–1800. 2nd ed. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1996.

Parrott, David. "Strategy and Tactics in the Thirty Years' War: The 'Military Revolution."' Militärgeschichtliche Mitteilungen 18, no. 2 (1985): 7–25. Reprinted in Rogers, The Military Revolution Debate.

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Roberts, Michael. Gustavus Adolphus: A History of Sweden, 1611–1632. 2 vols. London and New York, 1953–1958.

——. "The Military Revolution, 1560–1660." In Essays in Swedish History. London, 1967. Also reprinted in Rogers, The Military Revolution Debate.

Rogers, Clifford J., ed. The Military Revolution Debate: Readings on the Military Transformation of Early Modern Europe. Boulder, Colo., 1995.

Storrs, Christopher, and H. M. Scott. "The Military Revolution and the European Nobility, c. 1600–1800." War in History 3, no. 1 (1996): 1–41.

Van Creveld, Martin. Supplying War: Logistics from Wallenstein to Patton. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1977.

DAVID PARROTT