The "Military Revolution," 1560-1660--a Myth?
Author(s): Geoffrey Parker
Source: The Journal of Modern History , Jun., 1976, Vol. 48, No. 2 (Jun., 1976), pp.
195-214
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1879826
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The "Military Revolution,)' 1560-166a Myth?*
Geoffrey Parker
St. Sullator's College, University of St. Andreus
i;The sixteenth century constitutes a most uninteresting period in
European military history," wrote Sir Charles Oman in 1937, and no
one then dared to disagree with him. Today, however, few historians
would endorse his verdict. The early modern period has come to be
seen as a time of major change in warfare and military organization,
as an era of "military revolution." This shift in historical perspective
is mainly the work of one man: Michael Roberts, until recently
Professor of History at the Queen' s University of Belfast. His
inaugural lecture, entitled "The Military Revolution, 1560-1660" and
delivered at Belfast in January 1955, was an undisguised manifesto
proclaiming the originality, the importance, and the historical singularity
of certain developments in the art of war in post-Renaissance
Europe. Now most inaugural lectures, for better or worse, seem to
fade into the seamless web of history, leaving little trace; yet
Professor Roberts' s inaugural is still quoted time after time in
textbooks, monographs, and articles. His conclusions, as far as I
know, have never been questioned or measured against the new
evidence which has come to light in the twenty years or so which
have elapsed since he wrote. Such an examination is the aim of this
paper. 1
Roberts's 'imilitary revolution" took place between 1560 and 1660
in four distinct areas. First and foremost came a "revolution in
tactics": certain tactical innovations, although apparently minor,
were " the efficient cause of changes which were really revolu-
8 This article is based on a paper given at King's College in the University of
London in November 1974, as one of a series of lectures on "War and Society"
organized by Mr. Brian Bond and Dr. Ian Roy. Both made helpful suggestions about
the preparation of this study, as did Dr. Peter Burke, Mrs. Angela Parker, and Profs.
John Hale, H. G. Koenigsberger, and John Shy. I am grateful to all of them. Last, but
certainly not least, I would like to thank Prof. Michael Roberts for his help over many
years and for encouraging me to publish this article.
l M. Roberts, The Military Revolation, 1560-1660 (Belfast, 1956), reprinted in a
slightly amended form in Essays in Swedish History (London, 1967), pp. 195-225,
with some additional material on pp. 56-81. For examples of how the "military
revolution" has been accepted by other scholars, see G. N. Clark, War and Society in
the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, 1958); and again in New Cambridge Modern
History, vol. 5, The Ascendancy of France; 1648-1688, ed. F. L. Carsten (Cambridge,
1964), chap. 8. Compare the approach of C. W. C. Oman, A History of the
Art of War in the Sixteenth Centllry (London, 1937).
IJournal ef Modern Hist(1rx 4X (June 1976): 195-2141
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196 Geoffrey Pa1ker
tionary."2 The principal innovation in the infantry was (he claimed)
the eclipse of the prevailing technique of hurling enormous squares
of pikemen at each other in favor of linear formations composed of
smaller, uniform units firing salvos at each other; likewise the
cavalry, instead of trotting up to the enemy, firing, and trotting back
again (the caracole), was required to charge, sabers in hand, ready
for the kill. According to Roberts, these new battle procedures had
far-reaching logistical consequences. They required troops who were
highly trained and disciplined, men who would act as cogs in a
machine; and the cogs had to learn how to march in step and how to
perform their movements in perfect unison they even had to dress
the same.3 Individual prodigies of valor and skill were no longer
required. Of course all this training cost money; and, because the
troops had acquired their expertise at the government' s expense,
Roberts claimed that it was no longer economical for armies to be
demobilized when the campaigning ended: the trained men had to be
retained on a permanent footing. The new tactics, he argued, thus
gave rise inexorably to the emergence of the standing army, and the
first to pioneer these tactical reforms and therefore one of the first
to create a standing army in Europe was Maurice of Nassau,
captain-general of the army of the Dutch Republic.4
A "revolution in strategy" formed the second major strand of
Roberts's thesis.g* With the new soldiers, it proved possible to attempt
more ambitious strategies: to campaign with several armies
simultaneously and to seek decisive battles without fear that the
2 Roberts, Essays, p. 217.
3 On the whole, troops did not dress alike in most armies until the later seventeenth
century. It was the 1650s before the English and Swedish armies adopted uniform; the
French did not do so until the 1660s. Before that, troops dressed as they (or their
commanders) wished, carrying only distinguishing marks such as a feather, a scarf, or
a sash of the same color to mark them out from the enemy. Not surprisingly, there
were a fair number of cases of units from the same army attacking each other in the
confusion of battle. For the introduction of uniforms, see C. Nordmann, "L'Armee
suedoise au XVIIe siecle," Revue du nord 54 (1972): 133-47 (esp. p. 137); L. Andre,
Michel le Tellier et ltorganisation de l'armee monarchique (Paris, 1906), pp. 339-42;
and G. Parker, The Army of Flanders and the Spanish Road, 1567-1659: The
Logistics of Spanish Victory and Defeat in the Low Countries' Wars (Cambridge,
1972), pp. 164-65.
4 On the reorganization of the Dutch army by Prince Maurice and his cousin
William-Louis, see W. Hahlweg, "Aspekte und Probleme der Reform des niederlandischen
Kriegswesen unter Prinz Moritz von Oranien," BiXdragen en Mededelingen
betreffende de Geschiedenis der Nederlanden 86 (1971): 161-77; and M. D. Feld,
"Middle-Class Society and the Rise of Military Professionalism: The Dutch Army,
1589-1609," Armed Forces and Society 1 (August 1975): 419-42. Both authors stress
that, although classical precedents were closely studied by the Nassau cousins
(especially outstanding successes like the battle of Cannae in 216 B.C.), their relevance
to military conditions in the Netherlands was also carefully evaluated.
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'Military Revolution" 197
inexperienced troops would run away in terror. Gustavus Adolphus
of Sweden, victor of the Breitenfeld and conqueror of Germany,
certainly put these new strategic concepts into effect; according to
Roberts, he was the first.
A third component of the military revolution theory was a "prodigious
increase in the scale of warfare in Europe" between 1560
and 1660. The new strategy, Roberts pointed out, required far more
troops for ltS successful execution: an articulated force of five armies
operating simultaneously according to a complex plan would need to
be vastly more numerous than a single army under the old order.
Fourth and finally, this prodigious numerical increase dramatically
accentuated the impact of war on society. The greater destructiveness,
the greater economic costs, and the greater administrative
challenge of the augmented armies made war more of a burden and
more of a problem for the civilian population and their rulers than
ever before.
These four assertions form the kernel of the military revolution
theory. There was, of course, a great deal more the development of
military education and military academies,5 the articulation of positive
"laws of war,"6 the emergence of an enormous literature on
war and war studies,7 and so on but the four essential ingredients
of the theory were tactics, strategy, army size, and overall impact.
Have these assertions been modified in any way by recent research?
In the first place, it has become clear that the choice of the year
1560 as the starting point of the military revolution was unfortunate.
Many of the developments described by Roberts also characterized
warfare in Renaissance Italy: professional standing armies, regularly
mustered, organized into small units of standard size with uniform
armament and sometimes uniform dress, quartered sometimes in
specially constructed barracks, were maintained by many Italian
states in the fifteenth century. Machiavelli's oft-quoted jibe about the
5 There were a few centers of instruction like the academia militaris of John of
Nassau at Siegen (1617-23), and courses of obvious military utility, such as mathematics
and fencing, were added to the curricula of a number of colleges and schools; but,
when one remembers the central place of war in seventeenth-century society, the lack
of more formal education in military matters is somewhat surprising.
6 Roberts has commented on the proliferation in the seventeenth century of studies
on the "law of war" (Essays, pp. 216-17); the basic principles, however, already
affected the conduct of wars in the Middle Ages; see M. H. Keen, The Laws of War
in the Lclte Middle Ages (London and Toronto, 1965).
7 In England alone between 1470 and 1642, a total of at least 164 English and 460
foreign books was published. See M. J. D. Cockle, A Bibliography of Military Books
up to 1642 (London, 1900; reprint ed., 1957); and H. J. Webb, Elizabethan Military
Science: The Books and the Practice (Madison, Wis., 1965).
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198 Geoffrey Parker
campaigns of the condottieri that they were "commenced without
fear, continued without danger, and concluded without loss" was
unfair and untrue. The armies of Renaissance Italy were efficient and
effective; and the French, German, Swiss, and Spanish invaders had
to adopt the methods of the condottieri, both in attack and defense,
before they could make real headway against them. To a remarkable
degree, as we shall see, the character of early modern European
warfare, even down to its vocabulary, came direct from Renaissance
Italy. 8
There is no doubt, however, that Maurice of Nassau and his cousin
William-Louis made some important tactical innovations in the
army of the Dutch Republic. They reduced the size of their tactical
units and increased significantly the number of officers and underofficers;
they increased the number of musketeers and arquebusiers
(the "shot") in each unit; and they introduced the classical
technique of the "countermarch," whereby successive ranks of
musketeers advanced, fired, and retired to reload in sequence. The
last was certainly new, but, until the introduction of a more accurate
musket which could also be swiftly reloaded, the countermarch was
of limited practical value.9 Moreover, Maurice's other tactical innovations,
descnbed by Roberts, derived at least some of their "revolutionary"
character from a rather unfair portrayal of the "prerevolutionary"
warfare of the earlier sixteenth century. The Spanish
army in particular, which Roberts used as a foil to the tactical
reforms of Maurice of Nassau, was a force of impressive military
efficiency. By the 1 560s Spanish infantry on active service was
normally made up of small, uniform companies of between 120 and
150 men, grouped into tercios (or regiments) of between 1,200 and
1,500 men. 10 The Spanish infantry normally contained a heavy
8 On the influence of the Italian wars upon Europe's military history, see P. Pieri, Il
Rinascimento e la crisi militare italiana, 2d ed. (Turin, 1952); and M E. Mallett,
Mercenaries and Their Masters: Warfare in Renaissance Italy (London, 1974), esp
chaps 7 and 9. The points at which the European "military revolution" tended to
follow Italian precedents are indicated seriatim in the notes below; see n. 20 for the
linguistic inheritance
9 The countermarch was devised by William-Louis of Nassau, and a diagram
showing what was involved was sent to Count Maurice on December 8, 1594; see a
facsimile of this on p 6 of J B. Kist's commentary to J de Gheyn, The Exercise of
Armes, facsimile ed (New York, 1974) Feld has claimed that the countermarch
turned an army into "a unit of continuous production" and the soldiers into some sort
of assembly-line workers and that this constituted a major tactical improvement In
theory, this is true; but, as noted above, in practice there were serious technical
limitations (see Feld, n. 4 above. This important and interesting article was kindly
brought to my attention by P. D. Lagomarsino of Dartmouth College)
'° It is incorrect to say that "a Spanish army of 12,000 men would have four units"
(Roberts, Military Revolution, p 7). Although Roberts omitted this passage from the
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"Military Revolution'' 199
concentration of shot it was the duke of Alva who pioneered the
introduction of musketeers into every company in the l550s and in
the 1570s there were at least two companies which consisted solely
of shot in every tercio on active service.1l Throughout the Spanish
army, as elsewhere, the basic tactical and administrative unit was
the company: men were raised, trained, and paid in companies, not
in regiments and not as individuals. Although the Spanish army had
no larger formal tactical units like the brigades or battalions of the
Swedish army, it was Spanish practice to group a number of experienced
companies together for special assignments to form a task
force, known as an escuadron, which might number anywhere between
600 and 3,000 men, depending on the task to be performed.12
This flexible, informal arrangement for the infantry proved highly
satisfactory. The Spanish cavalry, too, was impressive in action. It
comprised mainly companies of light horse, each numbering between
60 and 100 troopers, some of them lancers and some of them
mounted gunmen (arcabuceros a caballo). In battle, as at Gembloux
in 1578, their intervention was decisive; at other times they policed
the countryside with ruthless efficiency. Dressed in turbans like the
Turkish light horse, whose tactics they successfully emulated, the
Spanish cavalry was as feared and as formidable as the tercios.
Spain' s more permanent armies were also distinguished by a
sophisticated panoply of military institutions and ancillary services.
In the Netherlands and Lombardy, at least after 1570, there was a
special military treasury, an elaborate and autonomous hierarchy of
judicial courts, a well-developed system of medical care with a
permanent military teaching hospital, mobile field-surgery units, and
resident doctors in every regiment and a network of chaplains
under a chaplain-general covering the entire army.13 Some, if not all,
revised edition of his paper, he still overestimated the size of the Spanish units on
active service (Essays, pp. 59-60, 62). It now appears that the Swedish army also did
not have regiments of uniform size (Nordmann, p. 137, n. 23) and that there was no
fixed ratio of pike to shot in the army of Gustavus Adolphus it all depended on the
availability of weapons at the time of recruitment.
" Take, e.g., the peacetime muster of the four Spanish tereios in the Netherlands,
held on May 12, 1571: there were fifty companies (an average of twelve per tereio)
and 7,509 men (an average of 150 men nine of them officers - per company). Of the
7,509 men, 596 (9 percent) were musketeers and 1,577 arquebus men, a total of 30
percent ''shot'' (''Relacion sumaria de los soldados que se pagaron,'' legajo 547, fol.
99 bis, Estado, Archivo General, Simancas).
12 The eseuadron was also a common tactical unit in the Dutch army, eo nomine;
see J. W. Wijn, Het Krijgswezen in den tijd van prins Maurits (Utrecht, 1934), p. 424.
For the Swedish equivalent, see A. Aberg, ' ' The Swedish Army, from Lutzen to
Narva," in Sweden's Age of Greatness, 1632-1718, ed. M. Roberts (London, 1972),
p. 282.
13 Parker, pp. 167-72, and the sources there quoted. It seems that Spain and
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200 Geoffrey Parker
of this administrative superstructure was also to be found attached
to the permanent Spanish forces in Naples and Sicily. Sixteenthcentury
Spain also had a complex training scheme for its men. In the
words of an envious English observer of 1590, " Their order is,
where the Warres are present, to supplie their Regiments being in
Action with the Garrisons out of his dominions and province s;
before they dislodge, bes<nios supply their place; raw men as we
tearme them. By these means he traines his besonios and furniseth
his Armies with trained Souldiers.' 14 From at least the l 530s
Spanish recruits were sent initially not to the front line but to the
garrisons of Italy or North Africa, where they learned the rudiments
of arms drill and combat discipline for a year or two before leaving
for active service. Their places were then taken by another generation
of recruits.15 It was an extremely efficient system, and it helps
to explain the remarkable military caliber, reputation, and track
record of the tercios. It was they, after all, who routed the "new
model" Swedish army at Nordlingen in 1634.
Lest this should seem like special pleading from a starry-eyed
student of Spanish history, one could point equally effectively to the
Austrian Habsburgs, who introduced much the same system for their
permanent armies on the Croatian and Hungarian border with the
Ottoman empire during the 1570s. 16 And, if even that were not
enough, there are the military organizations of France, England, and
the Italian states during the fifteenth century: all developed permanent
standing armies which were highly trained; seasoned in garrisons
before they went to the front; capable of fighting in linear
formations as well as in columns or squares; organized into small,
self-contained tactical units; and controlled by a special military
Sweden were far ahead of the field in the provision of religious care for their troops.
There were even Jesuit priests aboard the Dunkirk privateers after 1623 (see E.
Hambye, L'Aumonerie de la fSotte de Flandre au XVlle siecle [Louvain, 1967]), and
every soldier aboard the Spanish Armada of 1588 received a leaden medallion with the
Virgin on it (several of these have been found by nautical archaeologists excavating
the Armada wrecks off Ireland). The Swedish army in Germany had an "ecclesiastical
consistory" under an almoner-general, and every soldier was issued with a Lutheran
prayer book (Nordmann, p. 136).
14 Roger Williams, The Works of Sir Roger Williams, ed. J. X. Evans (Oxford,
1972), p. 15. See the confirmation of Sir Francis Bacon in 1624 that ''the great Secret
of the Power of Spaine . . . will be found, rather to consist in a Veterane Army (such
as vpon several Occasions and Pretensions, they haue euer had on foot, in one part or
other of Christendom, now by the space of (almost) sixscore yeares) than in the
strength of the Dominions and Prouinces" (Certaine Misc ellany Works [London,
1629], quoted in Williams, p. cxli).
15 Parker, pp. 32-35.
16 G. E. Rothenburg, The Altstrian Military Border in Croatia, 1522-1747 (Urbana,
Ill., 1960), chaps. 3-5; and E. Heischmann, Die Anfange des stehenden Heeres in
Oesterreich (Vienna, 1925), passim.
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{'Militczry Revolution" 201
administration. 17 The simple fact is that, wherever a situation of
permanent or semipermanent war existed, whether the Hundred
Years' War of the later Middle Ages or the Thirty Years' War of the
seventeenth century, one finds, not surprisingly, standing armies,
greater professionalism among the troops, improvements in military
organization and certain tactical innovations. Gustavus Adolphus in
the 1 620s and Maurice of Nassau in the 1 590s were forced to
overhaul their armies dramatically because of the disastrous defeats
which their predecessors had suffered in the preceding years. For
inspiration, it is true, they turned in part to classical writers like
Frontinus, Vegetius, and Aelian; but, like other rulers, they also
turned to other more successful military practitioners, especially to
the generals of Spain. Three of the best English military writers of
the reign of Elizabeth-William Garrard, Humphrey Barwick, and
Sir Roger Williams- had all served in the Spanish Army of Flanders
for several years and held up its practices as examples to others.18
The war in the Low Countries was a seminary in which many of the
great commanders of the German Thirty Years' War and the English
Civil War were formed.19 It is no accident that a large part of the
military vocabulary of northern Europe should have come from
Spanish.20
17 R. A. Newhall, MMster and Review: A Problem of English Military Administration,
1420-1440 (Cambridge, Mass., 1940); P. Contamine, Guerre, etat et socie'te a la
fin du moyen age: Etudes sur les armees du roi de France, 1337-1494 (Paris and The
Hague, 1972); C. T. Allmand, Society at War: The Experience of England and
France during the IIundred Years' War (Edinburgh, 1973); and Mallett (n. 8 above).
18 Garrard served in the Burgundian regiment of the baron de Chevreux in the
Netherlands for fourteen years; Williams served in the Spanish tercio of Julian
Romero from 1574 until 1578; Barwick mentions his Spanish service but does not
indicate how long it lasted. All three put their experience to good use in their
writings: see Webb, pp. 44-50. There was, of course, a vigorous debate throughout
most of the sixteenth century between the "Ancients" (who believed that Greece and
Rome had provided exemplars to be copied in all spheres save religion) and "Moderns"
(their opponents, of whom the three writers above are examples). See also
Hahlweg (n. 4 above).
19 See F. Redlich, The German Militarw Enterpriser and His Workforce, 2 vols.
(Wiesbaden, 1964), 1:157-62, for examples.
20 Sir Roger Williams stressed the point to readers of his Discourse of Warre
(1590): "Some will condemnde mee for my strange names of fortifications, they ought
to pardon me: for my part, I knowe no other names than are given by the strangers,
because there are fewe or none at all in our language" (Works, p. 41). In the
Netherlands, Simon Stevin's manual of fortification, Stercktebouwing (Leiden, 1594),
carried foreign military terms in the margin with an explanation in the text; while a
popular account of the Dutch Revolt, Emanuel van Meteren's History of the Low
Countries (The Hague, 1612), contained a special glossary of foreign military words
(''Vreemde krijghs-vocabulen"). In every modern army, many of the current officers'
titles ("captain," "sergeant," etc.) and some of those now obsolete (e.g., "reformado,"
an officer who is temporarily without a unit to command) appear to have
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202 Geoffrey Parker
The Dutch, however, did make a distinctive contribution of their
own. Maurice of Nassau and his cousin were convinced of the need
for standardization and uniformity in their forces. In 1599 they
secured funds from the States-General to equip the entire field army
of the republic with weapons of the same size and caliber. At about
the same time, Count John II of Nassau began work on a new
method of military training: the illustrated manual. He analyzed each
of the different movements required to manipulate the principal
infantry weapons, gave each of them a number, and prepared a
series of corresponding drawings to show what was required. There
were fifteen drawings for the pike, twenty-five for the arquebus, and
thirty-two for the musket. In 1606-7 the whole scheme was recast
now there were thirty-two positions for the pike and fortytwo
for each of the firearms-and a sequence of numbered pictures
was engraved and published under Count John's supervision: Jacob
de Gheyn's Wapenhandelinghe van roers, musquetten ende spiessen
[Arms drill with arquebus, musket and pike] (Amsterdam, 1607).
The book went rapidly through numerous editions in Dutch, French,
German, English, even Danish; there were pirated and plagiarized
versions; there were many subsequent attempts to produce rival
manuals (of which the best were Johan Jakob von Wallhausen' s
Kriegskunst zu Fusz of 1615, Henry Hexham's Principles of the Art
Militarie of 1637, and Jean de Lostelneau's Mareschal de bataille of
1647). The sudden popularity of the new genre of military textbook
is explained by the tactical changes of the sixteenth century. The
evolution from monolithic, massed pike formations to articulated
combinations of pike and shot, which made a more elaborate hierarchy
of ranks necessary, placed an increasing burden on the junior
officers and underofficers. They became the crucial links between
the army commanders and the small tactical units; they had to
control, discipline, and drill their men. It was to answer their needs
that de Gheyn and the rest produced their drill books. The situation
depicted in a picture of a company of the Amsterdam militia in 1625,
painted by W. van den Valckert, must have been fairly typical: the
captain is shown standing with de Gheyn's Wapenhandelinghe actucome
from Spain or Italy to France, the Netherlands, and England (see J. Herbillon,
Elements espagnols en wallon et dans le frant ais des anciens Pays-Bas [Liege,
1961]). It seems likely, however, that many of these military terms came first to
Spanish from Italian (J. Terlingen, Los Italianismos en espanol desde la formacion
del idioma hasta principios del siglc) XVII [Amsterdam, 1943] ). There is no full
analysis of the Spanish words loaned to Flemish and Dutch, although there is a
sketchy introduction by C. F. A. van Dam, "De Spaanse woorden in het Nederlandsche,"
in Bundel . . . aangeboden aan Prof. Dr. C. G. N. de Vooys (Groningen,
1940), pp. 86-103.
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"Military Revolution'' 203
ally open in front of him, trying to work out what to do next! The
Dutch may not have invented the "revolution" in tactics, but they
certainly iIlvented the best way of coping with some of its effects.2l
There is thus room for doubt concerning the novelty of the tactics
and the standing armies introduced by Prince Maurice and King
Gustavus. There is also some question about the originality of
Gustavus's strategy. Again, Roberts starts with a damaging critique
of the practice of sixteenth-century generals: "The sterility of warfare
in Europe, in the time of Prince Maurice, is the accurate
measure of the strategic thinking of the age." And in another
passage, "Strategic thinking withered away; war eternalized itself.
I I 22 Now the crucial influence on the evolution of strategic
thinking in the sixteenth century was the appearance of an entirely
new type of defensive fortification: the trace italienne, a circuit
of low, thick walls punctuated by quadrilateral bastions. In the
course of the fifteenth century it became obvious that the improvements
in gun founding and artillery had rendered the high, thin walls
of the Middle Ages quite indefensible. A brief cannonade from the
"bombards" brought them crashing down. The reason why the
kingdom of Granada fell to the Christians so easily in the 1480s,
when it had resisted successfully for seven centuries, lay in the fact
that Ferdinand and Isabella were able to bring a train of almost 180
siege guns against the Moorish strongholds.23 The English possessions
in France were likewise reconquered in the 1430s and 1440s
largely by Charles VII's artillery; at Castillon in 1453, the big guns
even won a battle. The initiative in warfare now lay with the
aggressor, and, not surprisingly, by 1500 every major European state
possessed a powerful artillery park for use against its neighbors or
21 Van den Valckert's painting of Captain Burgh's militia company hangs like
Rembrandt's more famous picture of the company of Captain Hans Banning Cocq,
done in 1642 in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. There is a reproduction of the portion
which clearly shows de Gheyn's book on p. 37 of Kist's commentary to de Gheyn.
Kist establishes beyond all doubt the influence of Johan II of Nassau on the
composition of the Wapenhandelinghe (pp. 14-1S), and he describes the measures
taken in 1599 to standardize armament in the Dutch army. For a little more information
on the first English edition of de Gheyn, see Anna E. C. Simoni, "A Present for
a Prince," in Ten Studies in Anglo-Dutch Relations, ed. J. A. van Dorsten (Leiden
and London, 1974), pp. S1-71.
22 Roberts, Military Revolution, p. 7, and Essays, p. 202.
23 M. A. Ladero Quesada, Castilla y la conquista del reino de Granada (Valladolid,
1967), p. 127. For a general assessment of the importance of artillery to Europe, see
C. M. Cipolla, Guns and Sails in the Early Phase of European Expansion, 1400-1700
(London, 1965). However, the demise of the old-style castles did not occur overnight.
In many areas where artillery could not easily be brought in, medieval fortifications
retained their value. See H. M. Colvin, "Castles and Government in Tudor England,"
English Historical Review 83 (1968): 225-34.
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204 GeofJI ex Pblrhel
against its dissident subjects. Military architects in Italy, where siege
warfare was most common, were the first to experiment with new
techniques of fortification which might withstand shelling; and Professor
John Hale has traced the evolution of the bastion defense in
Italy from about 1450, when it made its first appearance, until the
1 520s, when it was fully fledged . It was a development which
" revol utionized the defensive-offensive pattern of warfare, ' ' because
it soon became clear that a town protected by the trave
italiensle could not be captured by the traditional methods of battery
and assault. It had to be encircled and starved into surrender. 24
The French military writer Fourquevaux declared in 1548 that towns
whose fortifications were more than thirty years oldz that is, which
were built before the age of bastions, hardly deserved to be called
fortifications at all . i ' We must confesse ," echoed Sir Roger Williams,
"Alexander, Caesar, Scipio, and Haniball, to be the worthiest
and famoust warriers that euer were; notwithstanding, assure your
selfe, . . . they would neuer haue . . . conquered Countries so
easilie, had they been fortified as Germanie, France, and the Low
Countrios, with others, haue been since their daies."25 There was
therefore a scramble among the great powers to build the new
" miracle" defenses wherever there existed a risk of attack: in
Lombardy, in Hungary, in the Low Countries, along the south
coast of England, and elsewhere.
As it happened, these areas were all large plains "continental
islands," to use the language of Fernand Braudel where a few great
towns dominated the countryside. Whoever controlled the towns
controlled the countryside; and therefore in all these areas war
became a struggle for strongholds, a series of protracted sieges.
Battles were often irrelevant in these areas unless they helped to
determine the outcome of a siege. Even total victery on the field did
not necessarily compel the well-defended towns to surrender: they
could continue to resist, as did St. Quentin after the famous battle in
1557, or as the towns of Holland and Zealand were to do after 1572,
either until they were starved into submission or until the enemy
gave up through exhaustion.26 Naturally, since the trace italienne
24 J. R. Hale, "The Early Development of the Bastion: An Italian Chronology, c.
1450-c. 1534," in Europe in the Later Middle Ages, ed. Hale, J. R. L. Highfield, and
B. Smalley (London, 1965), pp. 466-94.
25 G. Dickinson, ed., The "Instructions sur 1e fai(t de la guerre" of Rawmond de
Baccarie de Pavie, Sieur de Fourquevaux (London? 1954), p. 85; and Williams, p. 33.
26 Parker, pp. 7-11 and nn. thereto. The same was true for many of the wars of the
Middle Ages. The Hundred Years' War was, according to a recent study, ''characterized
more by sieges than by any other form of martial exercise" (Allmand, p. 7:
see also pp. 6-9, 104-22).
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"Military Revolution'' 205
was introduced in those areas most likely to be fought over, and
since most of the fighting of the sixteenth century did in fact take
place there, it is true to say with Roberts that most generals, like
Maurice of Nassau, "had no ambition whatever to fight battles."
This proves only that they had a sQund grasp of strategic realities.
But whenever wars happened to occur in areas where the trace
italienne was absent-in Italy before 1529, in central France during
the religious wars, in the British Isles, or in Germany then battles
were both frequent and important: Pavia in 1525, Muhlberg in 1547,
Ivry in 1590, and so on. It was even possible in such areas to
operate a conscious Vernichtungsstrategie.27 It was also true that,
where bastions were absent and battles more frequent, cavalry was
more prominent: on Europe's steppe frontier, for example, with the
cossacks and stradiots, or during the civil wars in Germany and
England, with the furious charges of Pappenheim, Prince Rupert,
and Cromwell' s Ironsides . But even in these theaters of conflict,
battles were seldom i'decisive," in the sense that they brought the
war to an immediate end. Neither the Breitenfeld, nor Lutzen, nor
Wittstock, nor Jankow- four resounding victories for the "newmodel"
Swedish army terminated the Thirty Years' War. The two
battles of the war which came nearest to achieving "total" victory
were, as it happened, won by Spanish "old-style" forces: the White
Mountain in 1620 and Nordlingen in 1634.
The generals of the seventeenth century, like their predecessors,
were compelled to respect the dictates of military geography. When
in 1632 the imperial army under Wallenstein retreated into the Alte
Veste, a specially prepared stronghold near Nuremburg, Gustavus
Adolphus was compelled to expend a great deal of time, men, and
money in trying to starve them out. And in the end he failed. In
France, Vauban diligently erected a chain of modern defenses all
around the sensitive and exposed frontiers of the country. Coehoorn
did the same in the United Provinces. These fortifications of the later
27 See the policy of Sir Humphrey Gilbert, commander of Queen Elizabeth's forces
in Ireland in 1579 and a veteran of the Low Countries' Wars: "He further tooke this
order infringeable, that when soever he made any ostyng, or inrode, into the enemies
Countrey, he killed manne, woman, and child, and spoiled, wasted, and burned, by
the grounde all that he might: leavyng nothing of the enemies in saffetie, which he
could possiblie waste, or consume.... The killing of them by the sworde, was the
waie to kill the menne of warre by famine, who by flight oftentymes saved them
selves from the dinte of the sworde" (Thomas Churchyard, Generall Rehearsall of
Warres [London, 1579S, quoted in J. T. Johnson, Ideology. Reason, and the Limitatiosa
of War: Religio:s and Secular Concepts, 1200-1740 [Princeton N.J., 19751 pp.
14142. Johnson points out that this is an early application of the counterrevolutionarze
doctrine that ''if revolutionaries live among the people like fish in water, the way
to kill the fish is to dry up the water").
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206 Geoffrey Potrker
seventeenth century, vast star-shaped complexes which kept the
besieging artillery out of range of its prey, continued to be of
strategic importance until the 1 860s. Wherever they existed, they
made battles irrelevant and therefore unusual. Throughout modern
time as in the Middle Ages, military geography shaped strategy.28
There is thus some doubt about the significance of both the
tactical and the strategic aspects of Roberts' s military revolution.
But there is absolutely no doubt about its third constituent: the
growth in army size. Between 1530 and 1710 there was a ten-fold
increase both in the total numbers of armed forces paid by the major
European states and in the total numbers involved in the major
European battles. Table I demonstrates the inflation in armiesTABLE
I
INCREASED IN MILITARY MANPOWER, 1470-1710
Spanish Dutch
Oate Monarchy Republic France England Sweden Russia
1470S 20,000 ......... . . . 40,000 25,000
1 550S 1 50,000 ......... . . . 50,000 2(),0()0
1590S 200,000 ......... 20,000 80,000 30,000 15,000
1630S300,000.........50,000150,000....45,00035,000
1650S I 00,000 ......... . . . I 00.000 70,000 70,000
1670S70,000.........110,000120,000....63,000130,0001700S50,000.........100,000400,00087,000.100,000170,000
SOURCES.-For figures on Spain. Ladero Quesada p. 159: Rarker, The Army of Fliltide*s p. 6; and H. Kamen.
The War of Surcessiotl itl Spl,i,1. 17()()-1715 (Lndon. 1969). pp. 59-60 (for metrpolitan Spain tnly). For the
Dutch Republic F J. G. Ten Raa and F. de Bas, Het Staatsche leger. 156$-1795. 6 v>ls. (Breda, 1911-18)^ vol.
1, passim. For Francea Contamine! Gwerre. etat et societe. pp. 313-18; F. Lot. Recherches silr /evs effectifs des
urn1e(^Sfrancoises d^s gitrres zXltalis aux glerres de religzon (1494-156)) (Paris, l96'), pp. 135-XX; Andre. pp.
271-328; and H. I\tethivier. Lci Siecle de Louts .XlV (Paris, 1962). p. 6X. For England. C. G. Cruickshank,
Elizabeths Arnqy (Oxford 1966). passim; C. Firth. (romwells Are1y (I,ondon. 1962). pp. 34-35; and R E.
Scouller, Thf Armies ot (>)ueen Anne (Oxford, 1966), chap. 3. For Swetlen N1 Roberts, Tlle Early Vasas: A
History of Sweden. 1523-1611 (Cambridge, 1968), pp. 399A04; and Nordalann, pp. 133A7. For Russia, New
CzambriXe Modern History. (Cambridge, 1964) 5 577. R. Beans ''War and the Birth of the Nation-State,'' Journal
of tconomic History 33 (1'}73): 203-'1. provities some further figures (n the size of various ''natitnal'' armies
from A.D. I tO A.L). i599 (p. 21()).
28 Military geography also affected mllitary theory. It is true that Londono, Valdes,
Escalante, and the other Spanish writers of the period who dealt with war said very
little about battles; but this was because after 1559 Spain fought very few wars in
which battles were necessary. At least two of the wars in which she was engaged
were little more than extended guerilla actions: in new Galicia and in Chile. It is
therefore no surprise to find that the first European manual of guerilla warfare was
written by a Spaniard, Bernardo de Vargas Machuca, who had fought long years in
Chile. His Milicia de las Indias of 1599 described jungle warfare with operational
units of twenty or thirty men under a caudillo (leader) who knew not only how to
lead and how to fight but also how to cure sores and wounds inflicted deep in the
forest (most of his remedies involved the use of tobacco as a painkiller). which
vegetable seeds to take on the march to sow over the winter and harvest in the
spring, and so on. The Indians of Chile never fought battles, Vargas Machuca
observed, because they had learned from bitter experience that they always lost them!
For an account of the similar guerilla war on the northern frontier of Spanish
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"Militury Revolution'' 207
which was paralleled in navies and the rise in combatants is obvious
when one compares battles like Pavia (1525) and Nieuwpoort
( 1600), with 10,000 combatants on either side, and a battle like
Denain (1710), with 100,000 men per side.
If, however, we can accept Roberts' s assertion about military
manpower growth, we cannot a priori accept his explanation of it. It
cannot stem, as he thought, from the tactical and strategic innovations
of Maurice of Nassau and Gustavus Adolphus: first, because
these modifications were not so new; second, and more important,
because the rapid and sustained growth in army size predated them.
The Emperor Charles V had 55,000 men at the siege of Metz in
1552, long before Maurice was born, and the Spanish Army of
Flanders already numbered 86o000 men in 1574, when the prince was
only six years old. There were, in fact, certain other tactical changes
which cleared the way for the "prodigious increase' in army size.
For most of the Middle Ages, the principal arm in any military
force was the heavy cavalry, made up of fully armed knights on
horseback, three hundredweight of mounted metal apiece, moving at
speed. The knights were clumsy, expensive, and scarce; but they
were capable of winning great victories: Antioch (1098), Bouvines
(1214), and Roosbeke (1382), for example. There were also however
disastrous defeats especially in the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries, when it was discovered that a heavy cavalry charge could
regularly be stopped either by volleys of arrows or by a forest of
pikes. Later it was found that pikemen could be used offensively to
charge other groups of pikemen, once the mounted knights had been
impaled and disposed of. The victories of the Swiss infantry against
Charles the Rash of Burgundy in the 1470s wrote the lesson large,
and in the Italian wars the infantry component in every army
became steadily more numerous and more decisive. Charles VIII's
army in 1494 comprised about 18,000 men, half of them cavalry;
Francis I's army in 1525 comprised some 30,000 men, one-fifth of
them cavalry. The number of horsemen had decreased both absolutely
and relatively.29 This shift in emphasis from horse to foot was
crucial for army size. Whereas there was a limit to the number of
knights who could manage to equip themselves and their horses
ready for a charge, there was none to the number of ordinary men
America, see P. W. Powell, Soldiers, Indians and Sill?er: The Northward Advance of
Ner12 Spains 1550-1600 (Berkeley, 1969).
29 Lot (cited in table I n.), pp. 21, 56. Even where cavalry continued to play a
decisive role in battles, as in the French religious wars, its character and composition
(as well as its tactics) were entirely different from those of the fifteenth-century
gendarmerie. See R. Puddu, Eserciti e monarchie nazionali nei sec oli XV-XVI
(Florence, 1975), pp. 35-36.
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208 Geoffrey Parker
who could be enlisted and issued a pike, sword, and helmet. A
pikeman' s basic equipment cost little more than his wages for a
week, and in some cases even this paltry sum could be deducted
from the soldier's pay.
Thanks to the triumph of the pikemen, therefore, it became
possible for governments to recruit, arm, and train an unlimited
number of men. The road to unrestrained military increase lay wide
open. But it only lay open. There was nothing in all this which
actively compelled an army to augment its numbers. Indeed, over
fifty years were to pass between the final defeat of Charles the Rash
in 1477 and the first major increase in army size in the 1530s, an
increase necessitated by the vast number of men required to starve
out a town defended by the trace italieslne. Afte.r this period of
growth came four decades of stagnation: there was no further
increase in army size until the 1580s. No government could dream of
bringing larger concentrations of troops into action, for the simple
reason that none possessed the organization necessary to mobilize,
pay, and supply such a force. By the middle of the sixteenth
century, there were only ten cities in all of Europe with a population
in excess of 60,000. Before the promise of the Swiss achievement
could be fully realized, before the threshold of medieval army size
could be crossed, there had to be important changes in the financial
and administrative resources of the European states.30
The growth of military manpower depended not only on internal
factors like tactics but also on a number of extrinsic factors, totally
unrelated to the art of war itself. Perhaps four can be identified as
critical. In the first place, there clearly had to be governments
capable of organizing an(l controlling large forces. It is interesting to
note that the major waves of administrative reform in western
Europe in the 1530s and 1580s and at the end of the seventeenth
century coincided with major phases of increase in army size.31 On
the one hand, the growth of a bureaucracy was necessary to create
larger armies; on the other, it was necessary to control them. The
rapid numerical expansion of the early seventeenth century forced
some decentralization: governments used entrepreneurs to raise their
30 Bean (cited in table 1 n.) advanced a similar argument but failed to provide
convincing evidence. See the telling discussion of Bean's article by D. Ringrose and
R. Roehl in Jc)rlrnal c)f Economic History 33 (1973): 222-31.
31 J. Vicens Vives, "Estructura administrativa estatal en los siglos XVI y XVII," in
Xle congres international des ssiences historiques: Rapports, vol. 4 (Stockholm,
1960), pp. 1-24; 1. A. A. Thompson, "The Armada and Administrative Reform,"
English Historical Relienz 82 (1967): 698-725; G. N. Clark, The Seventeenth Century,
2d ed. (Oxford, 1961), chaps. 6, 7; and J. A. Maravall, Estado moderna y mentalidad
Ksocial, 2 vols. (Madrid, 1972), passim, esp. 2:513-85.
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"Military Revolution' 209
soldiersS sailors, and (in the case of the Mediterranean states) their
galley fleets. It has been estimated that between 1631 and 1634 there
were some 300 military enterprisers raising troops in Germany aloneS
ranging from Albrecht von Wallenstein, duke of Friedland and imperial
commander-in-chief (who raised entire armies under contract) to
minor gentry from Switzerland and the Tyrol (who raised single
companies or even single squadrons). It was the same story in most
areas of EuropeS even in countries like SpainS where troop raising
had been a jealously guarded royal monopoly in the sixteenth century.32
However, it is important to note thatS in all EuropeS only
Oliver Cromwell managed to emulate the generals of Rome or the
condottieri of Italy and wrest political power from his civilian
employers. Elsewhere, if we except the Ottoman empire with its
janissaries, governments always maintained a close rein on their
commanders and kept their armies under constant surveillance. War
departments proliferated in every country, squeezing out military
entrepreneurs and other middlemen and establishing a direct link with
every soldier in the army. Detailed records of the troops began to be
kept, so that the only surviving historical trace for hundreds of
thousands of men in early modern times is their army pay sheets.33
The numerical expansion of armies was also dependent on certain
elementary technological improvements. In order to supply 50,000
men (and camp followers) on the march, it had to be possible to
concentrate enough ovens to produce 50,000 loaves of bread a day;
enough water, wine, and beer had to be concentrated for them all to
drink; and there had to be enough carts and horses to carry their
baggage (which might amount to half a ton per mant) and enough
tents, beds, or shelters to accommodate at least the officers.34 Only
in the later sixteenth century did it become possible to meet these
basic human needs on a grand scale. Another elementary technological
frontier to be crossed concerned roads. It was not possible to
move large concentrations of troops at speed before the seventeenth
century because there were no roads outside Italy which were
32 The classic account of the organization of war by military middlemen is Redlich
(n. 19 above). For military contracting in sixteenth-century Spain, see, I. A. A.
Thompson, War and Administratisve Deleolntion: The Militarx Gvl ernment of Spatn in
the Reigrl of Philip II" (London, in press).
33 For some uses to which these copious military records can be put, see, for the
sixteenth century, Parker (n. 3 above); for the eighteenth century, A. Corvisiers
L'Armee franfaise de la fin du XUlIe siecle au ministere de Choiseul: Le Soldat, 2
vols. (Paris, 1964); and, for the nineteenth century, E. Le Roy Ladurie and P.
Dumont, "Quantitative and Cartographical Exploitation of French Military Archives,
1819-1826,^' Daedalles 100 (Spring 1971): 397-441.
34 For some examples from the Army of Flanders, see Parker, chaps. 2^ 3.
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210 Ceofyrey Parker
capable of carrying a large army, its supply train, and its artillery. In
the sixteenth century, even on a route used regularly by troops, like
the "Spanish Road" from Lombardy to Luxemburg, it was necessary
to build new causeways in the mountains and across marshes
and to construct special bridges over rivers and streams for every
military expedition- once every two years on an average- because,
after the troops had passed, everything was allowed to revert to its
former state.35 Only in the later seventeenth century did governments
see the need, and possess the means, to construct and
maintain permanent military highways: Charles XI of Sweden and
Louis XIV of France led the way during the 1680s. In the eighteenth
century roads even began to be used as a vehicle for imperialism, as
they had once been by the Roman Chinese and Inca empires, with
General Wade's network of military roads laid out mainly between
1726 and 1767, to tame the Scottish highlands.
However, for all this one needed money, and here we come to
two other, and perhaps more important, extrinsic limits to military
growth. First, there had to be a certain level of wealth in society
before heavy and prolonged military expenditure could be supported;
second, there had to be ways of mobilizing that wealth. It would
seem that between 1450 and 1600 the population of Europe almost
doubled, and in some areas it more than doubled; and there is little
doubt that, over the same period, there was a notable increase in the
total wealth of Europe. After about 1660 both population and wealth
began to increase again. This new prosperity was tapped everywhere
by taxation, either indirectly through excise duties upon consumer
goods or directly by a variety of levies on land capital, and (very
rarely) income. Government revenues increased everywhere in the
sixteenth century, delving ever deeper into the pockets and purses of
the taxpayers. HoweverS no government could pay for a prolonged
war out of current taxation: the income which sufficed for a
peacetime establishment could in no way prove equal to the unpredictable
but inevitably heavy expenses of a major campaign. The
state therefore had to spread the costs of each war over a number of
peaceful years, either by saving up in anticipation (as Queen
Elizabeth did before she decided to make war on Spain in 1585) or
35 Ibid., chap. 3. However, for a reminder that roads were not the only brake on
military mobility, see J. Milot ' Un Probleme operationnel du XVlle siecle illustre
par un cas regional,^' Rve btu 1lord 53 (1971): 269-90: Milot argues that, until 1700
at least, tactics dictated that armies on active service had to march as a single
formation (which might be 50^000 strong). No existing road network could cope with
a horde like that, and most ot the troops had to plough their way through trees and
scrub just like their predecessors in earlier centuries.
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"Militurx Rel (lution'' 21 1by
spending in advance the income of future years with the aid of
loans from bankers and merchants. With a small army this might not
be such a great problem France appears to have financed her
Italian wars from 1494 until 1529 with few ill effects36 but in the
sixteenth century the problem was very different because, apart
from the growth in numbers and the greater duration of wars (which
of course increased the overall cost), there was also the " price
revolution," which meant that it cost far more to put a soldier into
the field in 1600 than it had in 1500. This fact naturally did not
escape the notice of contemporaries: " If comparison were made
between the present cost to His Majesty IPhilip II1 of the troops who
serve in his armies and navies and the cost of those of the Emperor
Charles V LhiS fatherA, it will be found that, for an equal number of
men, three times as much money is necessary today as used to be
spent then."37 Written in 1596, this was, if anything, an underestimate;
but it was indisputable that each war cost more than the
preceding one and that for Spain, involved in so many long-enduring
conflicts, the progression was particularly alarming (see fig. 1).
154748 _
1552 59 __
1572 75
_ t
159s98
O 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
FIG. 1. Average annual cost of Spain's foreign wars (in millions of florins). The
source for this figure is Parker, The Arens of F/(1E1Cl(JTST pp. 134. n. 2; 287.
Fortunately for Habsburg imperialism, the Spanish crown was able
to draw on a relatively efficient financial system which enabled it to
borrow (or "anticipate") the revenues of up to ten years in advance
and, by brutal treatment of its lenders, to keep the interest rate down
to 7 percent or less. But even this did not produce all the money
required for wars, and many of the troops were left unpaid, some-
36 P. Contamine, 'i(Sonsommation et demande militaires en France et en Angleterre,
XIlle-XVe siecles" (paper delivered at the Sesta Settimana di Studio, Istituto
Internazionale di Storia Economica, Prato, May 3, 1974), pp. 26-27.
37 Esteban de Ibarran Spanish secretary of war, memorandum dated December 15,
1596, Additional Manuscript 28*373, fols. 129-30, British Museum, London (my
translation ).
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212 Geoffrey Parker
times for months and sometimes even for years. As a result, Spain's
soldiers regularly mutinied for their pay; and mutiny became almost
an institution of military life.38 However, it was an institution shared
with other armies. The Dutch army was periodically paralyzed by
mutinies in the 1 580s, as was the Parliamentary army during the
English Civil War (especially in 1644 and 1647). Many units of the
Swedish army in Germany mutinied in 1633, dissipating the prestige
won by the victories of the Breitenfeld and Lutzen, and again in
1635, encouraging the German Protestants to make peace with the
Habsburgs. The fact that the second mutiny was called an "alteration,"
the term invariably used by the Spanish mutineers to describe
their activities, betrayed the parentage of the practice.39 The perennial
problem for the Swedish, the Spanish, and indeed every government
in wartime was money. In the words of an English adviser
to the Dutch Republic during their war with Spain: "The matter of
greatest difficulty [in warl . . . is in proportioning the charge of the
warres and the nombers of the souldiers to be maynteyned with the
contribucions and meanes of the countreys."40 It was, above all else,
the financial resources of a state which held down the size of its
armed forces. If too many troops were engaged, or if they were
engaged for too long, mutiny and bankruptcy resulted.41
It was the Dutch who first perfected techniques of war finance
capable of sustaining an enormous army almost indefinitely. The cost
of the war with Spain from 1621 until 1648 steadily increased (from
an average of 13 million florins in the 1620s to an average of 19
million in the 1640s), but there was not a single mutiny or financial
crisis. On the contrary, in an emergency, the Dutch Republic could
3# G. Parker, "Mutiny and Discontent in the Spanish Army of Flanders, 1572-
1607," Past and Pre*ent 58 (1972): 38-52.
39 For the mutinies of the Parliamentary armies during the 1640s, see Firth (cited in
table I n.), chaps. 12, 14; J. S. Morrill, 'iMutiny and Discontent in English Provincial
Armies 1645-1647," Past and Present 56 (1972): 49-74. For Swedish mutinies during
the 1630s, see Ritstaltsleren Axel Oxenstiernas sltrifter oc h Brevl?axling, fcirra avdelningen
(Stockholm, 1894), vol. 8, nos. 169, 170, 244, 293-95 (letters of Oxenstierna to
field commanders, March 6, April 22, and May 15, 1633), and pp. 682-83 (memorandum
sent by Oxenstierna to the Swedish rad, May 13, 1633, about the "confoederatio
of the army); and Senare altdelningen (Stockholm, 1893), vol. 6, nos. 145,
146, and 149 (letters of Marshall Johan Baner to Oxenstierna, October 29 and 30 and
November 5, 1635, about the "alteration" organized and led by "der samptlichen
officieren von der gantzen armee." There were, of course? numerous mutinies by
Swedish troops before the reforms of-Gustavus Adolphus: see Roberts, The Early
Vasas, p. 258; and Nordmann, p. 135.
40 Thomas Wilkes, 'Declaration" (July 22, 1587), in Correspondentie lan Robert
Dudley, graaf van Lfgicester, ed. H. Brugmans, 3 vols. (Utrecht, 1931), 2:402.
41 On the financial organization of the European states during this period, see the
brief survey of G. Parker, The Elnergence of Modern Finance in Ellrope, 1500-1730
(London, 1974), pp. 38-67.
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"Military Revolution!' 2 13
raise a loan of 1 million florins at only 3 percent in two days.42 The
key to this effortless financial power was, in part7 the enormous
wealth of Amsterdam, which by 1650 was the undisputed commercial
and financial capital of Europe; but it was equally the good faith
of the Dutch government, which always paid interest and repaid
capital on time. This combination enabled the Dutch to raise an
army and go on fighting, whatever the cost, until they got their own
way: something no previous government had been able to do.43 It
was not long before others followed. Soon after the accession of
William of Orange in 1689, " Dutch finance" was adopted in England.
The foundation of the Bank of England, Parliament's guarantee
of all government loans, and the organization of a sophisticated
money market in London made it possible for a British army of
unprecedented size - 90,000 men - to fight overseas for years; while
in France the credit network of Samuel Bernard and other Swiss
bankers financed Louis X IV's later wars .
Thanks to all these improvements, by the first decade of the
eighteenth century the major wars of Europe involved some 400,000men
on each side, and major battles involved up to 100,000.44 It
therefore comes as something of a surprise to find that the major
conflicts of the 1760s and 1780s involved no more, that there was no
further growth in army size until the French Revolutionary wars. In
the eighteenth century, as in the fifteenth, it seems that the military
power of the various European states had reached a threshold.
Further economic, political, technological, and financial advances
would be required before this new threshold could be crossed in the
1790s.
However, the revolution in military manpower between 1530 and
1710 was extremely important. It certainly had all the significant
consequences which Roberts attributed to it: it made war impinge
more upon society; it increased the authority of the state (partly at
42"Raad van staat," bundels 1499, 1500 ("Stadt van oorloghe"), Algemeen
Rijksarchief, The Hague; the loan of 1664 was noted by V. Barbour, Capitalism in
Amsterdam in the Seventeenth Century (Baltimore, 1950), p. 81.
43 Contemporaries were aware of this: "In the wars of Europe these last four score
years and upwards . . . we find that the Estates of the United Provinces have paid
their armies better than any other prince or state; this makes the mercenary soldier
run to their service and capacities them to make great levies in a very short time"
(Sir James Turner, Pallas Armata [London, 1687], p. 198.)
44 In France it would seem that one man in six was called to the colors during the
war of the Spanish succession: Corvisier, 1:65. The calculation of "military participation
ratios" before 1700 is extremely hazardous, since neither the exact size of the
armed forces nor the total population is known with any certainty, and there is also
the problem of "foreign" troops serving in "national" armies. For these reasons, the
figures presented by Bean (table 1 n. ), p. 2 11 , are unconvincing.
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214 Geoffrey Parker
the expense of the citizen); it accentuated social mobility; and it
undoubtedly retarded the economic development of most participants
(although it stimulated that of many neutrals).45 In addition, it
certainly helped to precipitate the numerous confrontations between
governments and the governed which are commonly referred to as
the "general crisis" of the seventeenth century. 0 T4e "prodigious
increase in the scale of warfare" alone merits the title of "military
revolution" which Roberts bestowed upon it twenty years ago.
It has been suggested that the half-life of major historical theories
is roughly ten years; and the fates of Trevor-Roper's "general
crisis," Elton's "Tudor revolution," and Porshnev's "popular uprisings"
seem to bear this out. By this standard, Roberts's "military
revolution" has lasted well. Hitherto unchallenged, even this extended
examination has failed to dent the basic thesis: the scale of
warfare in early modern Europe was revolutionized, and this had
important and wide-ranging consequences. One can only conclude
by wishing the theory and its author many more years of undiminished
historical life.
45 See G. Parker, "The Costs of the Dutch Revolt," in War and Economic
Delselopment, ed. J. M. Winter (Cambridge, 1975), pp. 49-71.
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