by John Keegan
Mediterranean galley warfare, as the historian John Guilmartin has made so brilliantly clear, remained essentially what it had been for two millennia, an amphibious undertaking in which not only were the sea battles a variant of contemporary land battles, but the campaigns themselves were normally an extension of operations on shore. Armies and fleets accompanied each other by coastwise movement as far as possible, seeking to engage the enemy only when the inshore flank of the fleet locked with that of the army, or vice versa, preferably at a point where a fortified place could lend artillery support to both. Lepanto was an exception; in so far as a battle fought in inshore waters can be called a true naval engagement, Lepanto was that. It was won, however, not by ramming, not even by weight of artillery, but by clash of arms at short range between the shipboard soldiers of either side. The Christians had embarked arquebusiers and musketeers; the Ottomans opposed them with men using the traditional Turkish weapon, the composite bow. It was their loss — Turkish fatal casualties totalled 30,000 out of 60,000 men engaged — that made Lepanto the turning-point in Mediterranean affairs that it was. The lack of skilled naval archers, irreplaceable in a single generation, since it was a life’s work to master the necessary skills, ‘signified the end of a golden age of Ottoman power … Lepanto marked the death of a living tradition that could not be reconstituted.’23
Outside the Mediterranean, the contest at sea between armed ships was taking a different form, one in which the issue was decided not by bow-mounted cannon and the personal weapons of an embarked fighting-force, but instead by a great battery of artillery that filled the whole ship itself. Merchant craft had not hitherto been thought suitable for naval use, since their lack of oars, slow speed under sail and ungainly bulk unfitted them to mingle with galleys in maritime battle. In confined waters they offered easy prey, either to ramming or to bombardment from a quarter where the wind would not carry them. But in oceanic waters, the advantages were reversed. Not only were galleys unsuited by their extreme length and shallow keels to the long swells of the ocean; their need to revictual their large crews at short intervals by return to port meant that they could not keep the seas for more than a few days at a time, even if weather permitted. The load-carrying sailing-ship of northern waters, built to withstand those rougher seas, was under no such disadvantage, since its deep hull held rations and water-casks ample to supply a large crew for months at a stretch. Its defect was of a different order: since bow-mounted guns could be brought to bear only when the wind was behind, and there was no guarantee that the enemy would appear downwind, any artillery embarked would have to be fired through ports cut in the ship’s sides, an arrangement that required both its own ancillary technology, in the form of a braking-mechanism to absorb recoil, and the devising of a new way of handling ships in battle.
With an adaptability akin to that shown by fortress-engineers on land, shipwrights solved the problem almost as soon as it was presented to them. The small fifteenth-century cannon had been housed in ‘castles’ built at bow and stem. When ‘great guns’ were developed at the beginning of the sixteenth century, they were placed below decks, equipped with rope tackle to prevent their careering out of control when discharged, and positioned to fire ‘broadside’. The first ship so constructed is generally held to be the English Mary Rose of 1513; by 1545 an English ship like the Great Harry was mounting heavy artillery on two decks; and by 1588 great fleets of ships so equipped fought a running battle up the English Channel lasting seven days.24
The resulting defeat of the Spanish Armada, decisive though it was in determining the balance of advantage between Protestant and Catholic powers in the sixteenth-century wars of religion, is less representative of the significance of the armed sailing-ship, however, than the oceanic voyages of the Portuguese, Spanish, English and Dutch to the Americas, Africa, Indies and Pacific from the end of the fifteenth century onward. Sailing-ships of the northern European type, which shed dependence on the auxiliary power of oars and proceeded under sail alone, carried Columbus to America in 1492 and then the conquistadors who destroyed the civilisations of the Aztecs of Mexico, the Maya of Yucatan and the Incas of Peru. Horses rather than cannon were the important cargoes of the conquistadors in their campaigns of conquest — Cortés disembarked seventeen in Mexico in 1517, Montejo fifty in Yucatan in 1527 and Pisarro twenty-seven in Peru in 1531 — since the species, wiped out in the Western Hemisphere by the hunters of the original migrations 12,000 years earlier, was terrifyingly strange to the native warriors. Their ritualised style of combat also unfitted them to confront Europeans who fought to win rather than to take sacrificial captives; but, in a contest of hundreds against thousands, it was their horses that gave the invaders the decisive advantage.
Elsewhere, cannon were the key weapons of the European maritime adventurers. In 1517 the Portuguese learned at Jiddah, in the Red Sea, whither they had sailed round the Cape of Good Hope, that it was too dangerous to close with a local (in this case Mameluke) fleet supported by cannon on shore, and their attempt to block the maritime spice route into the western Islamic lands therefore failed. Yet they had already established a naval supremacy in the Indian Ocean by their victories at Ormuz (1507) — the choke point through which Gulf oil is shipped today — and at Diu on the west coast of India (1509).25 Soon they would reach out to establish bases in the East Indies (1511), and China (1557), and then to contest possession of the Philippines with Spain. By the end of the century, the cannon-armed forts the Iberian seafaring nations had planted along the coasts of all the world’s oceans were claim stakes of empires that were to grow during the next 300 years.
The societies which the first European navigators encountered had few means with which to oppose their demands, first, for trading-rights, then for land on which to build trading-posts, finally for exclusive trading-rights enforced by military control. African coastal kingdoms, protected by a disease barrier, survived intact into the nineteenth century, but only at the cost of complicity in an ever-expanding and horribly destructive slave-gathering trade into the hinterland. The Japanese preserved their traditional society by closing their maritime borders and defying the Europeans to test their hardihood in battle against that of the samurai. China was protected from dissection by its enormous size and bureaucratic coherence. Much of the rest of the world proved easy prey. In the Americas, which the Spanish and Portuguese intended to colonise from the start, native societies had no effective means of resistance, not even an appropriate state of mind, with which to oppose their military power. The small sultanates of the East Indies were easily overcome, while most of the Filipinos whom the Spanish encountered were simple tribal cultivators. Only in India was there a state system organised at a level adequate to deny the Europeans intrusive footholds; yet even the Moghuls, since they were recent conquerors whose control at the periphery was not absolute, failed to exclude them altogether. Moreover, no Moghul emperor succeeded in organising a seagoing, cannon-armed fleet, the only guarantee of a coastline’s security against its European equivalent.
If the navigators found little to resist them beyond the sea frontiers of the Ottoman lands, that did not mean they voyaged unopposed. On the contrary: the prizes at stake were so rich that they were rapidly driven to fighting each other, both in distant seas and in home waters, whence the expeditions to the lands of gold and spices originated. The Dutch first arrived on the Coromandel coast of India in 1601 and the English eight years later. Soon they were both fighting the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean — the Dutch fought them also off Brazil in 1624–9 — and then each other in the English Channel and North Sea in three great naval wars of 1652–74. Both nations also fell into conflict with the Spanish over trading-rights in the Caribbean which, after the introduction of sugar cane from the Canaries and slaves from Africa to raise it, was to grow into the richest colonial area in the world; and then with the French who, latecomers to voyaging, established trading-posts in India and West Africa and the beginnings of an overseas empire i
n North America by the mid-seventeenth century.
These gunpowder wars at sea, fought broadside with ships that by 1650 mounted fifty guns apiece in fleets seventy or more strong, emphasised the power of artillery even more strikingly than did fortress warfare on land. The best siege-engineer might take weeks to reduce a well built citadel; in the Three Days’ Battle off southern England (1653), the Dutch lost twenty warships (out of seventy-five) and 3000 men killed, a result fairly representative of how intensive action at sea had become and a warning that worse was in store. By the end of the eighteenth century the largest sailing-ships would mount a hundred cannon, while losses in the Franco-Spanish fleet that fought at Trafalgar (1805), a one-day battle, exceeded 7000 dead. The warrior culture of the pikeman and the man on horseback had migrated to sea, where sailor-cannoneers stood by their guns in a hundred point-blank battles with all the steadfastness of the hoplite in the phalanx.
GUNPOWDER STABILITY
The demands made by the warfare of seaborne artillery on the courage and skill of European mariners were scarcely to vary between the appearance of the ‘great ship’ of the early sixteenth century and the eclipse of its direct and easily recognisable descendant, the ship-of-the-line, by the steam-powered ironclad in the mid-nineteenth century. On land, however, the developing capabilities of gunpowder weapons were to perturb soldiers throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The mobility and firepower of cannon continued to increase, to a point where lighter pieces were actually being deployed with effect in the battlefield by the end of the seventeenth century.26 By about the same date, the firepower and handiness of the musket also improved, allowing it to be fired without a rest; a new flintlock mechanism was less susceptible to damp than the old slow match. Yet the difficulty of arriving at the correct proportion between ‘shot’ and pike in the infantry, and then between infantry and cavalry, persisted.
Cavalry, challenged by shot, sought to perpetuate its battlefield role by adopting an ever more elaborate horsemastership — akin in its complexity to the furusiyya of the Mamelukes — which, by a routine of wheeling and caracole, was supposed to facilitate the use of firearms from horseback (the routines survive at the Spanish riding school in Vienna). The experiment was not successful. Firearms and horses do not mix, and in any case the infantry responded by elaborating its own tactics so effectively as to rob horsemen of the chance to catch musketeers at a disadvantage. That was indeed part of the reason why armies retained pikemen, in a proportion of one to two as against musketeers, well into the seventeenth century. Pikemen could deny room for manoeuvre to cavalry that threatened a battle line with sword or pistol, while protected by musketeers who held their fire to contest a charge.
Nevertheless, pikemen and musketeers could not simultaneously occupy the same space, and, while their weapons complemented each other, they could not do the same work. The battles of the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48) in Germany, involving the armies of the French, Swedes and Habsburgs, were in consequence confused and messy affairs; Gustavus Adolphus, the Swedish soldier-king, was killed at Lützen (1632) precisely because he rode his horse into a static struggle between musketeers and cavalrymen. The solution to the difficulty, however, lay at hand. At the end of the seventeenth century all European armies almost simultaneously adopted a new attachment to the musket, the ring bayonet, which permitted it to serve as pike and firearm simultaneously.27
Yet it was not the musket-bayonet combination alone that gave eighteenth-century battles their distinctive character. Even more important was the universalisation of infantry drill. Drill had ancient origins. It is conjectured that the Macedonians drilled their phalanxes, though the simplicity of phalanx tactics makes that hard to credit. The Romans certainly subjected the legionary recruits to the school of arms, teaching them to throw their javelins at a mark and to wield shield and sword in uniform style. Nevertheless, it is most unlikely that a Roman legion’s evolutions in formation, whether it was in contact with the enemy or not, resembled in any way at all those of a musket-bayonet force. The Romans did not practise the cadenced stop — a style of marching not possible for soldiers to learn until governments created large, level parade grounds in the eighteenth century — while the exertions of muscle-power fighting cannot be narrowly regularised; it seems that the legionary was encouraged to pick an individual target for his javelin.28
Gunpowder drill had an altogether different end in view. It undoubtedly originated in a natural concern of musketeers — which must have been felt by archers also (an unexplored subject) — not to wound each other while using their weapons. Whereas the archer risked impaling only a single neighbour, musketeers ranked in close order, especially in the early days when they scattered loose powder near to burning slow matches, threatened to set off a chain of accidental discharges unless all the men performed the many steps of loading, aiming and firing in exact unison. The musketry drill books — equivalents, in their way, of industrial safety manuals of a later age — which were widely printed from the early seventeenth century onward, divide the sequence into numerous precise actions — forty-seven in Maurice of Orange’s drill book of 1607 — from the moment when the musketeer takes up his weapon to that when he pulls the trigger.
Still, the seventeenth-century musketeer was an individualist. He may not have chosen his moment to fire, but he probably chose his own target in the opposing ranks. By the eighteenth century, that freedom was disappearing. The musketeers of the royal regiments which had come into existence after the end of the Thirty Years’ War — the most senior of the Austrian, Prussian and British armies, for example, were raised in 1696, 1656 and 1662, respectively — were trained to aim not at a man but at the mass of the enemy; drill sergeants, carrying an otherwise obsolete half-pike, used it to knock the muzzles of the front rank’s muskets to an equal level, so that when the order to fire was given, the bullets, in theory at least, departed at a uniform height above the ground to strike a simultaneous blow across the front of the rank opposite.29
The soldier’s loss of individualism was made manifest in numerous other ways. From the end of the seventeenth century he wore uniform clothing, as household servants did. The idea of uniform was indeed the same as that of livery. It marked its wearer out as someone in the servile employment of a master and, therefore, as a person of restricted rights and liberties. The sixteenth-century soldier gloried in the diversity of his raiment, often collected by looting; indeed, the Renaissance fashion of slashing the outer garment to display the silks and velvets worn underneath had been adopted precisely to demonstrate that a soldier could take fine things as he pleased and wear them with impunity. Their leaders indulged them. ‘It was argued that soldiers should be free to choose their own clothes … they were thought more likely to fight bravely and cheerfully that way.’30 Eighteenth-century soldiers were expected to fight not cheerfully but dutifully and on command; to enforce discipline, officers treated their men with a harshness that neither the free pikemen nor the mercenaries of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries would have tolerated. They had accepted hanging or disfigurement as the arbitrary penalty for mutiny or murder, but they would not have accepted the regime of statutory flogging or casual beating by which the liveried military servants of the dynastic monarchies were kept in order.
Indeed, only an entirely different sort of individual from the anarchistic freebooters of the Italian wars and the Thirty Years’ War would have acquiesced in the new regime. A high proportion of the soldiers of the seventeeth-century civil wars in France had been ‘outlaws, vagabonds, thieves, murderers, deniers of God, renouncers of debts’, who drifted into military service because they had turned their backs on civil life and it on them.31 Not all, of course, belonged to those debased categories. The Spanish and, especially, the Swedes (the latter through the Indelingsverket system of military smallholding) succeeded in enlisting steady men from villages or farms to form their regular regiments, but ‘scum’ was what mercenary employers generally got. The dyn
astic monarchies got something else, often the younger sons of large, poor families to whom civil employment offered few opportunities, whom a notional form of conscription generally brought into the army, particularly in France; in Prussia and Russia, where the peasantry was widely enserfed from the seventeenth century onward, outright compulsion applied.32 Though its organisers might have denied it, we can recognise this as a military slave system, close in character to that of the Ottoman janissary force, recruited by levy and kept in obedience by harsh discipline and an almost complete denial of civil rights to its members. The style of fighting it practised, that of stereotyped, almost mechanical drill-movements performed in serried ranks, exactly reflected the surrender of individuality its members had undergone.