Before the Military Revolution

Before the Military Revolution European Warfare and the Rise of the Early Modern State 1300–1490

by

Alexander Querengässer

Oxford & Philadelphia

Published in the United Kingdom in 2021 by OXBOW BOOKS The Old Music Hall, 106–108 Cowley Road, Oxford, OX4 1JE and in the United States by OXBOW BOOKS 1950 Lawrence Road, Havertown, PA 19083 © Oxbow Books and the author 2021 Hardback edition: ISBN 978-1-78925-669-7 Digital Edition: ISBN 978-1-78925-670-3 A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Control Number: 2021939533 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission from the publisher in writing.

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Front cover: Illustration from Sammelhandschrift zur Kriegskunst (Vienna c. 1430) Österreichische Nationalbibliothek Cod. 3062, fol 315 Back cover: Diebold Schilling the Younger, “Battle of Grandson”, from Luzerner Chronik. Wikimedia Commons.

Contents Acknowledgements ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������iv Introduction ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� v 1. Medieval Warfare 1000–1300 ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 1 2. War in Europe 1300–1400 ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 5 3. War in Europe 1400–1450 ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 55 4. War in Europe 1450–1490 ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 97 5. Naval Warfare ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 135 6. Guns and Pike Squares: Revolutions of Medieval Warfare? ����������������������������������� 151 7. A Revolution of Knowledge ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ 175 8. From the Feudal Levy System to Mercenary Armies: a Social-Military Revolution ���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 187 9. Military Change and the Development of the Early Modern State ���������������������� 205 Conclusions �������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 221 Selected Further Reading �������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 227

Acknowledgements First of all, I would like to thank Prof. Jeremy Black and two unknown reviewers for their comments on an early draft. I have been reading Jeremy’s work for a long time now and studying his work has made me a better historian – or at least so I hope – as it has forced me to think differently and to take a broader view on historical processes.

It is a pleasure to be able to dedicate this book to him now.

I also feel indebted to Oxbow Books for taking my book into their programme.

Felicity Goldsack and Jessica Scott have been two very kind editors. I enjoyed working with them and appreciated their professionalism. Lucy Doncaster did a great job in revising the manuscript. I know, I gave her a hard job to do, but she did great.

Halle an der Saale, May 2021

Introduction The concept of a “Military Revolution” in the early modern period is frequently criticised,1 but nevertheless historians still adopt the phrase to describe many periods – in most cases, the periods in which they are most interested. We can thus say, albeit in a somewhat contentious manner, that nearly everything that happened in military history from the Early Middle Ages to the present day was sooner or later considered to be a military revolution. Moreover, since Michael Roberts2 and Geoffrey Parker3 created their concept, it has been applied to many processes and developments, not only in the early modern period, but also in the Middle Ages.4 I am therefore critical of the term “Military Revolution”, which is often seen as a development initiated by new weapons systems. I will instead argue that the most fundamental change, which defined early modern warfare in Europe and influenced state building and state development, was the shift from the feudal levy to a mercenary system. While the feudal levy interlinked military service in a complex way with the handover of sovereign rights, the latter was basically a system of service in return for money. This made money a much more important resource for war making, thus increasing the need to raise more of it in the form of permanent taxes, which became perhaps the most important task of the modern state.

Since this shift was a long-term development, I want to be careful about my use of the term “Military Revolution”, with its connotations of immediacy. Also, it is doubtful that the development of the mercenary system was that simple, simply interlinking military developments with the state building process. Developments in state administration could have been the cause of a change in the military system, not the other way around, while money as a resource also became central because of economic developments that had nothing to do with either state building or warfare. In this regard, it is no wonder that the “modern” mercenary system developed in Italy, where a money-based economy was more advanced than in the rest of Europe.

1 Notably within the many works of Black, J., A Military Revolution? Military Change and European Society 1550-1800 (Basingstoke: Red Globe Press 1991); Beyond the Military Revolution. War in the Seventeenth Century World (Basingstoke: Palgrave McMillan 2011).

2 Roberts, M., “The Military Revolution, 1560-1660”, in: Roberts: Essays in Swedish History (Minneapolis: Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1967), pp. 195–225.

3 Parker, G., The Military Revolution. Military Innovation and the rise of the West 1500-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1988).

4 Ayton, A. and Price, J. L. (eds), The Medieval Military Revolution. State, Society and military change in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (London: Bloomsbury 1995).

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Last but not least, this development does not imply the replacement of an outdated military system with a completely new one. Mercenaries had existed before that and the feudal levy system still provided the basis for modern militia systems – indeed, it was often the backbone for the transport systems of many early modern armies.

So, instead of speaking of a revolutionary change, it is better to speak of a fundamental shift within the existing systems.

All this will be discussed in this book. In order to understand the developments and shifts of the late medieval period, though, one must discuss medieval warfare in general. So, in the first chapter, we examine the role of the feudal levy system and cavalry, and the fact that mercenaries and infantry also played a vital role (for example for sieges) in the High Middle Ages.

The next three chapters give an overview of warfare in Europe in the period from 1300 until 1490, looking at the Hundred Years’ War, wars with the Ottomans, and warfare in Italy, Spain, Scandinavia, Eastern Europe, Britain and within the Holy Roman Empire. This is important in order to show the diversity of warfare and also different external influences, especially the Ottoman Empire. I decided to split the time covered into three periods: 1300–1400, 1400–1450 and 1450–1490. Defining timeframes is always a difficult task for a historian and the ones I’ve chosen might be deemed haphazard, but there is a logic. Compared to the 14th century, the 15th saw much more extensive and rapid developments, so it made sense to split this century in half. Furthermore, the resumption and the end of the Hundred Years’ War in the West, the developments in the State of the Teutonic Order in the Baltic region, the Hussite rebellion in Central Europe and the conquest of Constantinople made dividing the periods around 1400 and 1450 quite sensible. The same is true for 1490, because many developments ended in the last decade of that century, such as the Reconquista of Spain. New developments also began in this decade, for example the Italian wars and Maximilian’s campaigns in Frisia, both of which were conducted with new kinds of mercenary armies, which fit into the period of the Landsknechte (German mercenaries).

“Regionalisation” is also quite an artificial method for grouping information. In some cases, special regions of conflict can be localised easily, for example the British Isles, the Iberian and Italian peninsulas and the Baltic regions, which – for most of the time – were quite closed theatres of war. By contrast, there is little cause to refer to the region of “the Balkans” from the 14th century until the Fall of Constantinople in 1453 and afterwards, because for the conquest of the Byzantine Empire it seems more reasonable to focus on the Ottoman Empire as a whole, which was expanding into both the Balkans and the Aegean. Such an approach cannot avoid a certain amount of overlapping, but this alone underlines an important point, which will be discussed later in the book, namely that especially the Late Middle Ages saw a “Europeanisation” of politics in that political and military affairs between two territories did not happen in a vacuum, but had an increasing effect of the geopolitics of the respective region, if not Europe as a whole.

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Within these three chapters it seemed sensible to describe the nature of warfare in the European regions. This should demonstrate the diversity of warfare, but also the importance of geography – a seemingly obvious fact that is often neglected by historians, who sometimes reduce medieval warfare to knights and castles and consider everything else unimportant or irrelevant. And yet Europe offers a huge range of regions that are very different from one another in terms of geography. For instance, during the Hundred Years’ War, English armies only had to cross the English Channel and the majority of the fighting was done on land, whereas warfare in the Baltic area was dominated by the sea, which formed the centre of this area, with all territories situated around it. What’s more, whereas there are relatively few islands in the Baltic, and they are of low economic or strategic value, the situation was very different in the Mediterranean, where there are hundreds of islands and even smaller ones of no economic value at all could be situated in significant locations, such as Malta. Finally, the Balkans and Eastern Europe offered wide and comparably thinly populated areas, which in the case of the Balkans were dominated by huge mountain ridges and so differed significantly from the flatter and smaller landscapes fought over in France and modern Belgium during the Hundred Years’ War. Geography and topography are therefore evidently central factors, and influenced the creation of military systems. There was no general pattern for creating successful armies, only models that could more or less successfully be adapted to suit different terrains and conditions. The ability of armed forces to adopt these strategies and adapt them for different circumstances, which was often dependent on cultural factors, can be regarded as a sign of “modernity” and an inability to do so as “backwardness”.

Naval warfare is given its own chapter, and then comes a sixth chapter about the so-called “revolutions” in late medieval warfare, especially the Infantry Revolution and Artillery Revolution. This chapter will recontextualise both by showing that the importance of infantry before, and that of cavalry during, the late medieval period was underrated and that artillery, while being more and more important, had not yet had a truly revolutionary effect on war making or state building (except perhaps for the Hussites). This chapter also demonstrates that medieval warfare cannot merely be reduced to epic battles, but was much more complex and included aspects of small warfare, especially feuds, which were much more common than large-scale battles.

The seventh chapter discusses the importance of knowledge. While it is still the Renaissance that is presented as the age when Roman and Greek military culture and treatises were rediscovered, many of the so-called Mirrors for Princes of the medieval period also refer to authors of antiquity. However, they play a secondary role, because their focus is on infantry, whereas in the Middle Ages it was cavalry that was more dominant on the battlefields. Even so, classical authors were not “rediscovered” in the Renaissance, they just became more relevant, as infantry became dominant once more.

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At the same time, whereas the Mirrors for Princes were complex encyclopaedic handbooks for rulers that covered everything, new, specialised treatises on war making were published from the 15th century onwards in increasing numbers.

Because of the printing revolution, these works could be distributed far abroad and were no longer written just for princes but for professional military personnel.

This reveals that an independent profession of “soldier” had emerged, which was different from that of the earlier knight, who was – however well trained – a parttime soldier, part-time landlord.

Chapter eight is about what I – with the greatest care and reference to the existing concepts – would call the “late medieval social-military revolution”. In other words, the shift from feudal levy to mercenary armies, as I have described above.

The final chapter discusses the influence of this process on the development of the early modern state with all its pros, cons and as-yet-unknown variables. This a key chapter because the original Roberts/Parker thesis revolved around the influence of military change on state building – a fact that is often neglected by others, who used this term just to describe changes in the way war was waged. Of course, it should not be argued that at the end of the Late Middle Ages the early modern state just appeared as a complete, fully formed entity. State building was an ongoing process, not a linear, progressive or teleological one. However, state building, like further changes in the military system from the 16th to the late 18th centuries, continued the tradition of primarily using paid volunteers or mercenaries as core forces. This was made possible by the fact that most European states were monarchies with deep pockets and large estates, which had a right to grant budgets (especially for the military), or else were ruled by other countries (like the Netherlands).

This dual approach inevitably will lead to some repetition, but I consider it essential, to give due weight to a chronological and regional approach and afterwards analyse central aspects of war making and state building. Also, a significant focus is given to operational history and the description of battles – an approach that is regarded by some as outdated. However, many historians of the “new military history” base their conclusions solely on the outcomes of battles and a short analysis of the structures of the armies involved. This has led to theories based on simplifications and erroneous assessments of relative military capability, founded only on the knowledge of the outcome of a battle and not its conduct. An example of this is the conclusion that the Swiss victories over the Burgundians in 1474–1476 were based on the superiority of their massed pikemen over the Burgundian knights. However, a proper analysis of the battles shows the importance of coincidence and bad leadership on the Burgundian side on the outcomes of these encounters. Structural analyses of armies are therefore important, but they cannot replace operational history. Good organisational structures are no guarantee for success. Huge and well-supplied armies have been defeated throughout history and small, ragged bodies of troops have been able to win astonishing victories. The frictions of war, the unforeseeable and maybe the surprising influence of individuals have to be considered and this can only be

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done by describing and analysing a campaign. “The acid test of an army is war”, wrote Alfred Vagts. “War is the criterion and war only.”5 This book is based on a rich foundation, especially of recent English-language scholarship. Clifford J. Rogers, Kelly DeVries – who among many other things wrote a valuable work on military technology6 – Anne Curry and Christopher Allmand all made valuable contributions to my general understanding. However, their focus, like that of French historians Philippe Contamine and Bertrand Schnerb or their Dutch colleague Jan Verbruggen, is on Western Europe. While German scholars have also contributed special case studies, which are valuable (notably, works by Uwe Tresp and Jürgen Sarnowski), general histories of late medieval warfare are overly simplistic, if not to say flawed. They follow a loose acceptance of English scholarship with too much emphasis on the cultural aspects of warfare and less on the political, operational or tactical dimensions.7 While Eastern European scholars of course also contribute to our understanding of late medieval warfare, language barriers made it difficult for me to cope with works that cover the whole of Europe, which is necessary for the approach of this book. However, I did refer to Brian Davis who, among others, published a well-researched collection of essays about warfare in Eastern Europe.8 The process of state building is closely linked to the topic of the “fiscal state”.

Valuable essays on the English, French, Castilian and German state-building process in the Late Middle Ages are included in Richard Bonney’s volume about the rise of the fiscal state9 and I draw upon these.

The intention of this book is both to summarise recent scholarship, presenting it to the students of late medieval (military) history, and to forward a new thesis: namely, that the two centuries between 1300 and 1490 transformed the social and military organisation of the High Middle Ages into the political, fiscal and military organisations that characterised most of Europe in the early modern period until the upheavals of the Napoleonic age.

Q.v. Vagts, A., A History of Militarism. Civilian and Military (London: Hollies 1959), p. 16.

DeVries, K., Medieval Military Technology (Peterborough: Broadview Press 1992).

7 Kortüm, H-H. (ed.), Krieg im Mittelalter (Berlin: Akademie Verlag 2001); Kortüm, Kriege und Krieger 500–1500 (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer 2010); Prietzel, M., Krieg im Mittelalter (Darmstadt: Primus 2006).

8 Davis, B. (ed.), Warfare in Eastern Europe 1500 – 1800 (Leiden – New York: Brill 2012).

9 Bonney, R. (ed.), The rise of the fiscal state in Europe, c. 1200-1815 (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1999).

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