A History of Warfare

by John Keegan

  By the early sixteenth century, therefore, it was clear that to deploy a combination of pikemen with some missile arms — crossbow, longbow, firearm — offered a potent means of combating cavalry in an open battlefield. A better combination still was of cavalry, archers or handgunners and infantry, and it was with such a force that Charles the Rash, Duke of Burgundy, had confronted the Swiss in the battles of 1474–7; he had gone down to defeat not because his forces lacked any essential component but because his funds failed to pay an army strong enough to match that of the Swiss in numbers.15 Nevertheless, the proportion among his different contingents — in 1471, he had 1250 armoured horsemen, 1250 pikemen, 1250 handgunners and 5000 archers — remained experimental. It may have been the wrong one, but no one as yet knew what was right. Machiavelli believed that an army should contain twenty foot-soldiers to each cavalryman, but did not specify how the infantry should be armed. A great deal of effort in the sixteenth century was devoted to establishing the correct mix.

  Handgunners were clearly essential. Venice, which lived by trade and the military force necessary to protect it, decided in 1490 to replace all crossbows with gunpowder weapons and in 1508 to equip the newly formed state militia with firearms.16 Until about 1550, however, when the prototype of the armour-penetrating musket was introduced, hand-held firearms remained relatively ineffective. They were fired by applying a burning match to an open touchhole, both prone to malfunction in wet weather, and they threw comparatively light balls only a short distance. Nevertheless they badly frightened and sometimes hurt both infantry and cavalry at close ranges, with the result that Renaissance commanders looked for some battlefield antidote. Cannon seemed best to provide it. That can be the only explanation of the unprecedented, rarely to be repeated and quite bizarre nature of the engagements at Ravenna (1512) and Marignano (1515). In each case a French and a Spanish army fought a pitched battle, freely entered into by both sides, in which the point about which they manoeuvred was formed by a large entrenchment hastily thrown up as a bastion of support for the sitting party’s gunpowder weapons.

  At Ravenna, the French, whose army contained a large contingent of German mercenaries, freebooters who were making the same sort of living in the Italian wars as the Greek veterans of the Peloponnesian wars had done in the Hellenistic world, advanced to check the Spaniards. The French had about fifty-four cannon, used in the mobile role, the Spanish about thirty emplaced in an entrenchment. By relentless cannonade, the French provoked the Spanish cavalry into charging, and then broke them up, but when the German mercenaries advanced they were held up at the entrenchment and a desperate hand-to-hand struggle ensued. Eventually two French cannon were brought round to the rear of the Spanish position, and their fire panicked the Spaniards into retreat.

  Three years later, the roles were reversed. At Marignano it was the French who were entrenched while the enemy, a Swiss force serving the Spanish alliance, advanced to contact; they did this so rapidly — a characteristic of their headstrong style of giving battle — that they got into the entrenchment before the French artillery could make its effect felt. The Swiss were repulsed by a counter-attack but reorganised and next morning attacked again. (Marignano is an unusually early example of a battle lasting more than one day.) By then, the French artillery was well prepared and the battle at the entrenchment degenerated into a bloody stalemate that ended only when a force of Venetians, French allies, approached from the rear and menaced the Swiss into withdrawal. Disengaging as rapidly as they had attacked, they drew clear; but their losses had been so heavy that they shortly afterward accepted the French offer of a negotiated peace, by which was laid the basis of the relationship under which Switzerland became the principal supplier of mercenaries to the French army for the next 250 years.17

  What made Ravenna and Marignano so extraordinary was that the combatants chose to fight battles in the open field as if they were extempore sieges — the consequence, it would seem, of contemporary commanders not having thought out a better way of using artillery than from behind improvised siegeworks. They had recognised the power of artillery to disrupt the traditional offensive purpose both of cavalry and of infantry in phalanx, which was the formation in which the Swiss fought; they could not as yet improve on those tactics for their own offensive purposes.

  In fact, an alternative method was available. At Cerignola (1503), the French had been repulsed from a Spanish entrenched position by the firepower of the Spanish handgunners, and at Bicocca (1522) the outcome was repeated; 3000 Swiss infantry, fighting on the French side, were killed in half an hour of senseless aggression against Spanish entrenchments strongly defended with firearms. The experience deterred the Swiss, despite their reputation for disregard of danger on the battlefield, from ever again attacking handgunners positioned behind an obstacle.

  Yet it was clear that giving battle could not persist for ever along lines where one side entrenched itself and awaited attack. By so doing the entrenched army tied itself to a particular spot, which its enemy might decide to bypass in order to despoil friendly countryside or attack isolated fortresses at leisure. The invitation to battle pitched in such an extreme form would bring on an engagement only if the other side accepted the challenge; if it chose to conduct mobile operations, the defender would have to do likewise. The prosecution of mobile operations with artillery and firearms demanded, therefore, a change in the cultural attitude of Renaissance armies. Though they had admitted gunpowder technology to their traditional practices, they had not adjusted to its logic. Like the Mamelukes who bore down, sword in hand, on the firearms of the Egyptian sultan’s black slaves, they were still trapped in an ethos which accorded warrior status only to horsemen and to infantry prepared to stand and fight with edged weapons. Fighting at a distance with missiles was beneath the descendants of the armoured men-at-arms who had dominated European warmaking since the age of Charlemagne. They wanted to fight from horseback, as their grandfathers had done, and they wanted such infantrymen as accompanied them to bear the manly risks of standing to receive cavalry at point of pike. If guns had to take their place on the battlefield, then let it be behind ramparts, which was where missile weapons had always belonged. What the horse soldier did not want to see was the sturdy footman reduced to the level of the cunning crossbow mercenary: what he wanted to do even less was dismount and learn the black art of gunpowder himself.

  The cultural roots of the mounted aristocrats’ resistance to the gunpowder revolution went deep into the past. As we have seen, the Greeks of the phalanx age were the first warriors of whom we have detailed knowledge who cast aside the evasiveness of primitive warfare and confronted their like-minded enemies face-to-face. Not for them the preliminaries of the ‘conflict of champions’ that, in a variety of forms, we find in the warfare of tribal peoples and that provide the high points of Homer’s account of the Trojan War. The Greeks of the classical age sought to settle an issue by the quickest and most direct means possible. The Romans of the early republic accepted the logic of Greek methods also, indeed probably learnt them from the Greek colonists of southern Italy. One might suppose that it was the Romans’ encounter with first the Gauls, then the Teutonic peoples from beyond the Rhine, which progressively transmitted the habit of face-to-face fighting to them as well. The Romans gave testimony that the northerners fought in such a way, for, though they despised their crude, individualistic tactics, they never denied their courage or readiness to come to hand strokes. ‘Many of [the Helvetii],’ Caesar observed, of an episode when his legionaries had peppered the enemy’s shields with javelins, ‘after a number of vain efforts at disentangling themselves preferred to drop their shields and fight with no protection for their bodies.’ It was only when ‘the wounds and the toil of battle [became] too much for them [that] they began to retire’.18 However, it seems clear that the Gauls fought face-to-face before they even met the Romans, if the great swords of the Hallstatt culture offer any indication, and it appears that the Germans, whose courage
ous and warlike nature so impressed Tacitus, were also doing so before they met the Romans on the Rhine in the first century AD. If we recall that it was only after the arrival of the Dorians in Greece that phalanx warfare developed, and accept that the Dorians probably made their way thither from the Danube, then it may be that we can locate there both a common point of origin for this ‘Western way of war’, as Victor Hanson calls it, and a line of division between that battle tradition and the indirect, evasive and stand-off style of combat characteristic of the steppe and the Near and Middle East: east of the steppe and south-east of the Black Sea, warriors continued to keep their distance from their enemies; west of the steppe and south-west of the Black Sea, warriors learned to abandon caution and to close to arm’s length.

  The reason for this final abandonment of the psychology and conventions of primitivism in the West and for their persistence elsewhere baffles analysis. The line of division follows that prevailing between climatic, vegetation and topographical zones quite closely though the linguistic division much less exactly: Greeks, Romans, Teutons and Celts spoke Indo-European languages, but the Iranian peoples, who did so as well, did not join them in choosing to surrender the bow for the spear or the sword, preferring instead to persist in reliance on missile weapons and the tactics of rapid strike and swift disengagement. It seems dangerous to ascribe any racial explanation to the phenomenon. During the nineteenth century, both the Zulus and the Japanese acquired the disciplines of Western-style combat apparently from first principles and certainly by their own effort. All that can be said is that, if there is such a thing as the ‘military horizon’, there is also a ‘face-to-face’ combat frontier, and that Westerners belong by tradition on one side of it, and most other peoples on the other.

  The force of this face-to-face tradition provoked the warrior crisis of the sixteenth century. The attitude to crossbowmen of Bayard, chevalier sans peur et sans reproche, is well known; he had them executed when taken prisoner, on the ground that their weapon was a cowardly one and their behaviour treacherous. Armed with a crossbow a man might, without any of the long apprenticeship to arms necessary to make a knight, and equally without the moral effort required of a pike-wielding footman, kill either of them from a distance without putting himself in danger. What was true of the crossbowman was even more true of the handgunner; the way he fought seemed equally cowardly, and noisy and dirty as well, while requiring no muscular effort whatsoever. ‘What is the use, any more,’ asked the biographer of the sixteenth-century warrior Louis de la Tremouille, ‘of the skill-at-arms of the knights, their strength, their hardihood, their discipline and their desire for honour when such [gunpowder] weapons may be used in war?’19

  Yet, for all the protests of the traditional warrior class, it was clear by the mid-sixteenth century that firearms as well as cannon had come to stay. The arquebus and the heavier musket, both fired by a mechanism which brought a slow match to the priming-pan by the release of a trigger, were efficient weapons, the latter capable of penetrating armour at 200–240 paces. The foot-soldier’s breastplate was of decreasing value as a means of protection; even more ominously, so was the horseman’s full armour. By the end of the century it was no longer worn, and cavalry itself was losing its decisive purpose on the battlefield. That purpose had always been equivocal; the effect of a cavalry charge had always depended more on the moral frailty of those receiving it than on the objective power of horse and rider. And once the horseman encountered an opponent who could muster the resolve to stand, as the Swiss pikemen had found, or a weapon that could bring a rider to the ground with certainty, as the musket could, the right of the knightly class to determine how armies should be ordered, and to retain an equivalent social pre-eminence, was called into question. In France and Germany, the aristocracies held out against the pressure ‘to dismount in order to stiffen foot soldiery’, but the facts of life were not on their side, and neither were the state paymasters, who increasingly wanted value for money.20 In England, Italy and Spain the traditional military class were readier to scent the changed direction in which the breeze was blowing, to embrace the new technology of gunpowder and to persuade itself that to fight on foot might be an honourable calling after all.

  In Spain the ‘hidalgo’ — son of somebody — most enthusiastically accepted the logic of the gunpowder tradition, perhaps because it was the Spanish who, in this experimental age, found themselves with the largest wars on their hands. In the Italian wars of the first half of the century they were situated in an environment where cannon dominated without argument. The multiplicity of ingeniously fortified places which the Italian siege-engineers had built to withstand artillery attack meant that soldiers who were not masters of the low art of gunnery could not keep the field; while in the waterlogged theatre of war in the Netherlands, cavalry automatically yielded first place to infantry, which alone had the freedom to manoeuvre in the narrow spaces between canals, estuaries and walled towns. Young Spanish noblemen readily accepted commissions as infantry officers in the Dutch wars, fighting with regulars enlisted in Spain itself and large contingents of mercenaries hired in Italy, Burgundy, Germany and the British Isles; they thus initiated a precedent that, in the eighteenth century, would make vacant places in the regiments of British, French, Russian and Prussian foot guards the most eagerly competed for by well-born young men with military ambitions.21

  GUNPOWDER AT SEA

  While armies were hesitantly and reluctantly adapting themselves to the coming of gunpowder, European mariners were adjusting to its implications in an altogether more positive spirit. The transportation of cannon on land may have confronted military quartermasters, forever strapped for means to transport heavy loads along bad roads or none, with a new, all but insoluble problem; seagoing warriors found no comparable difficulty. On the contrary: ships and cannon were made for each other. The cannon’s weight was easily accommodated in what by design was a load-bearing vehicle, while the cannon’s necessaries, ball and powder, could easily be housed in its cargo-carrying spaces. The only complication that the cannon imposed on the shipwright was that of absorbing its recoil within a vessel’s confined dimensions. On land, a cannon’s recoil was expended when it ran back on its wheels at the moment of discharge; at sea, the necessary room was not available. If mounted free, its firing would damage the ship’s timbers, perhaps even knock a hole in the side or bring down a mast. It had to be harnessed to the structure and its recoil either decelerated by a braking-mechanism or else transferred to the ship’s own line of least resistance.

  The latter was the solution adopted by the galley-masters who first embarked cannon in the Mediterranean. The Mediterranean galley had an ancient lineage, which ascended at least to the oared ships of the Egyptians and the ‘Sea Peoples’ who first fought in open waters during the second millennium BC. Since the greater part of its long, narrow hull was filled by oarsmen, cannon might be mounted only at the bow or stern; since shipwrights had been familiar since the time of the Persian wars with the practice of strengthening the bow to permit ramming, it was there that they placed the cannon. When fired, the recoil was partly absorbed by the ship itself, which, if in motion at the moment of firing, was imperceptibly slowed by the shock of discharge, if at rest was driven slightly backward; it was later found desirable, as a means of absorbing primary recoil, for the largest centre-line cannon to be so mounted as to slide backward on a platform.22

  It was with galleys so armed that the battles for control of the eastern Mediterranean were fought between the Ottoman Turks and their Christian enemies during the first half of the sixteenth century. After the Ottomans had captured Constantinople (1453), then effectively all that remained to the Byzantines of their once great possessions, they had concentrated their formidable energies on consolidating what had once been the eastern Roman empire into one of their own. Serbia came under Ottoman control in 1439, Albania in 1486 and the Peloponnese in 1499. Internal troubles then checked the Ottoman advance, but the undisputed s
uccession as sultan of Selim I in 1512 led to the crushing of Safavid Persia in 1514 and the conquest of Egypt from the Mamelukes the following year. Thus by 1515 the borders of Ottoman territory ran from the Danube to the lower Nile and from the headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates to the shores of the Adriatic, enclosing an area almost as large as that which the Byzantines had controlled on the eve of the great Arab offensive in the seventh century. Selim’s son Suleiman, ‘the Magnificent’, who succeeded in 1520, set out to make the area of Ottoman control even wider. He captured Rhodes, then held by the Hospitaller order (1522), and, in an extended offensive into the Balkans, seized Belgrade (1521), destroyed the armed power of the Hungarian kingdom at the battle of Mohacs (1526) and in 1529 arrived under the walls of Vienna to challenge the Habsburg empire in the first great Ottoman siege of that city.

  Meanwhile the Turks were also taking to the sea to push their advance westward against Christendom. They had already raided deep into the Adriatic to outflank the Habsburgs from the east and to serve warning on Venice that it maintained its island possessions in the Aegean only on sufferance. Christendom struck back. In 1532, Andrea Doria, admiral of the great trading city of Genoa, raided the Peloponnese, and when a second Holy League of Spain, Venice and the Papal States was formed in 1538 to contest both the Ottoman threat in the Mediterranean and that of France (which in 1536 entered into an expedient alliance with the Turks) in Italy, he became the chief of the combined fleet. The tide of battle swung wildly from end to end of the inland sea. In 1535 the great Turkish admiral Khair ed-Din took Tunis and, though driven out by Doria, then defeated him in the battle of Preveza off the western coast of Greece (1538). This victory freed the Turkish fleet to raid deeply into the western Mediterranean in the following years, as far as Nice, not then French (1543), and Spanish Minorca (1558). Despite some successful Christian counter-attacks against the Muslim pirate ports on the North African coast — notably at Djerba in 1560 — the balance of advantage lay with the Turks who, in Greece and Albania, had found an ample supply of Christian galley oarsmen willing to serve for pay. Venice and Spain, more dependent on slaves and criminals, had difficulty in matching their numbers. All that stood between the Ottomans and free use of the Mediterranean for offensive purposes was the island of Malta. Malta, dominating the straits that divide the eastern and western Mediterranean at the point where Sicily and North Africa adjoin, had been turned by the Hospitaller knights into a mighty fortress, but its strength was not equalled by their number. Besieged in May 1565, the fortress held out against a combined land and sea attack until September but was relieved only by the intervention of a Spanish fleet. The Ottomans’ achievement of complete control of the Mediterranean had only narrowly been averted. The threat was finally ended at Lepanto, the Holy League’s victory over the Turkish fleet off the Peloponnese in 1571, and then rather because of the crippling loss to the Turks of a high proportion of their corps of trained composite bowmen than because of a loss of ships, which was swiftly made good.