War: What is it good for?

by Ian Morris

  The first result was a spike in the number of battles, because any army that yielded the open countryside and retreated to its fortresses was now bound to lose. Between 1495 and 1525, western Europeans fought a dozen major engagements, a rate unprecedented since antiquity. But over the next decades that changed, as advances in offense called forth defensive responses. Europeans now abandoned the high stone walls that had held attackers at bay since the days of prehistoric Jericho. Instead, they raised low, sloping earth banks that deflected or absorbed cannonballs. The new walls were easier for infantry to climb over, but the solution to this problem was also to hand. “Our first care,” Machiavelli observed around 1520, “is to make our walls crooked … [so] that if the Enemy attempts to approach, he may be opposed and repulsed just as well in the flank as in the front.”

  Over the next century, expensive new walls, shaped like starfish and studded with projecting ravelins, bastions, and hornworks, spread across Europe. With defeated armies again able to retreat into impregnable fastnesses, battles abruptly lost their appeal. Between 1534 and 1631, western Europeans hardly ever risked head-on clashes, and when they did do so, it was usually while one side was trying to relieve a siege. “We make war more like foxes, than like lyons,” said an English soldier, “and you will have twenty sieges for one battell.”

  It all sounds like another Red Queen story, with Europeans running faster and faster just to stay in place, pouring out blood and gold on increasingly terrible but ultimately pointless wars. Yet as in the case of the invention of fortifications, metal arms and armor, and all the other ancient revolutions in military affairs that we saw in Chapter 2, nothing could be further from the truth. Western Europeans could not outpace each other, but they did pull ahead of everyone else on the planet.

  For centuries, Europeans had been on the defensive against Mongols, Turks, and other invaders. The fall of Constantinople in 1453 sent shock waves through the continent, and in 1529 a Turkish army reached the gates of Vienna. A generation later, Europe’s prospects looked darker still. “Can we doubt what the result must be,” the leading European negotiator in Constantinople gloomily asked himself, on comparing Christendom’s “empty treasury, luxurious habits, exhausted resources, [and] broken spirits” with the Turks’ “unimpaired resources, experience and practice in arms, veteran soldiery, [and] uninterrupted sequence of victories”?

  To most people’s surprise, it turned out that the answer was yes. Even as the ambassador was writing, the military balance of power was shifting Europe’s way. In 1600, the Turkish commander in Hungary gloomily reported that “most of the troops of these accursed ones [that is, Christians] are on foot and arquebusiers. Most of the troops of Islam are horsemen, and not only are their infantrymen few, but experts in the use of the arquebus are rare. For this reason, there is great trouble in battles and sieges.”

  Europeans had been steadily increasing the numbers of gunners in their armies for a century. The trend accelerated after the 1550s, when Spaniards introduced a new kind of handgun, the musket, which threw a two-ounce lead ball hard enough to pierce plate armor a hundred paces away. In the 1520s, infantry with edged weapons—pikes, swords, halberds—had typically outnumbered arquebusiers three to one, but a century later the ratio of shot to pike had been reversed. Cavalry, its medieval dominance over, had been relegated to scouting, skirmishing, and guarding the flanks. Horsemen rarely made up more than one-tenth of a seventeenth-century army.

  And so we have yet another paradox. Around 1415, the Mongols and Ming China had the most powerful armies on earth, and Henry V and the other kings of Europe lagged far behind. By 1615—and perhaps even by 1515—that was turning around, and few armies in the world could have stood against European firepower. Europeans had got the top guns, and Asians, who had invented gunnery, had not.

  Why did China not keep its early lead in firearms and go on to wage its own Five Hundred Years’ War on the world? This is probably the single most important question in the whole of military history, but there is little agreement on the answer.

  The most popular theory, versions of which we have encountered in earlier chapters, is that Europeans were the beneficiaries of a unique Western way of war. They had inherited it from ancient Greece, and it was responsible for their gunpowder revolution. “The critical point about firearms and explosives is not that they suddenly gave Western armies hegemony,” the military historian Victor Davis Hanson suggests, “but that such weapons were produced in quality and great numbers in Western rather than in non-European countries—a fact that is ultimately explained by a longstanding Western cultural stance toward rationalism, free inquiry, and the dissemination of knowledge that has its roots in classical antiquity.” Europe’s takeoff, he concludes, was “logical given the Hellenic origins of European civilization.”

  At this stage in the book, you will not be surprised to hear that I am unconvinced. I tried to show in Chapter 2 that there was no such thing as an ancient Western way of war, because the ways Greeks and Romans fought were not uniquely Western. They were just the local (Mediterranean) versions of a pattern found all across the Eurasian lucky latitudes, which we might call the productive way of war. I went on in Chapter 3 to argue that everywhere from China to the Mediterranean this ancient productive way of war unraveled in the first millennium A.D. in the face of the rise of cavalry. If these claims are correct, then Hanson’s suggestion that continuities in the Western way of war explain Europe’s gunpowder takeoff must be incorrect, and when we look closely at what happened in sixteenth-century Europe, there is just too much that the Western way of war theory does not explain.

  Other historians have gone into detail on this, so I will concentrate on just a couple of issues. If it is really the case that “it is this Western desire for a single, magnificent collision of infantry, for brutal killing with edged weapons on a battlefield between free men, that has baffled and terrified our adversaries from the non-Western world for more than 2,500 years” (Hanson’s words), why was the new European style of fighting all about standing at a distance and firing guns rather than closing to use edged weapons? If the Western way of war has always been about “the absolute destruction of the enemy’s forces in the field” and “the desire to deliver fatal blows and then steadfastly to endure, without retreat, any counter response,” why did Europeans fight so few battles in the century between 1534 and 1631? And why, if “for the past 2,500 years … there has been a peculiar practice of Western warfare, a common foundation and continual way of fighting, that has made Europeans the most deadly soldiers in the history of fighting,” had Europeans spent a whole millennium—from roughly A.D. 500 through 1500—in general retreat before raiders and invaders from Asia and North Africa?

  Some historians propose a very down-to-earth answer to all these questions. Europe’s firearms revolution, they argue, had nothing to do with cultural traditions: Europeans simply got good with guns because they fought a lot. Europe, the theory runs, was divided into lots of little states that were always at each other’s throats. China, by contrast, was a unified empire for most of the time between 1368 and 1911. As a result, the Chinese rarely fought and had little reason to invest in improving guns. For the feuding Europeans, however, investing in better guns was literally a matter of life and death. Therefore it was Europeans, not Chinese, who perfected the gun.

  But this too leaves important questions unanswered. Despite its unity, China fought a lot between 1368 and 1911, often on a scale that dwarfed Europe’s squabbles. In 1411 and again in 1449, emperors sent armies half a million strong against the Mongols. Fighting against pirates filled much of the sixteenth century, a terrible struggle with Japan devastated the Korean peninsula in the 1590s, and in 1600 a quarter of a million men were mobilized against a revolt in Sichuan. So why did none of these wars spur European-type innovations in firearms?

  The real issue, the historian turned attorney Kenneth Chase explains in his magnificent book Firearms: A Global History to 1700, was n
ot how many but what kinds of wars Europeans and Asians fought. The first guns were clumsy, slow things, their rates of fire measured in minutes per shot rather than shots per minute. They only really worked against clumsy, slow targets, such as city walls, which is why the first great advances were in siege artillery.

  The hotbed of innovation was initially southern China, because the wars against the Mongol overlords of the mid-fourteenth-century Yangzi Valley would be won by storming fortresses and sinking big ships fighting in the constrained space of a river. For both these jobs, early guns were excellent. But when the fighting ended in 1368, the main theater of war shifted to the steppes in northern China. Here there were few forts to bombard, and slow-firing guns were useless against fast-moving cavalry. Chinese generals, being rational men, spent their money on extra horsemen and a great wall rather than incremental improvements in firearms.

  Europe—at least when it came to gunnery—had more in common with southern than with northern China. It was full of forts, had plenty of broken landscapes that constrained armies’ movements, and, because it was so far from the steppes (which made cavalry expensive), its armies always included a lot of slow-moving infantry. In this environment, tinkering with guns to squeeze out small improvements made a great deal of sense, and by 1600 so many improvements had accumulated that European armies were becoming the best on earth.

  If Ming dynasty emperors had had a crystal ball and could have seen that by the seventeenth century firearms would be effective enough to defeat nomad cavalry, they would surely have taken the long-term view and made the investments to come up with corned powder, muskets, and wrought-iron cannons. But in the real world, no one can foresee the future (hard though some of us try). All we can do is respond to the immediate challenges that face us. Europeans invested in guns because it made sense at the time; Chinese did not invest in guns, because it did not make sense at the time; and because of all this good sense, Europe (almost) conquered the world.

  Payback

  Europeans had learned about guns in the fourteenth century because travelers, traders, and fighters had carried them westward across Eurasia, and in the sixteenth century Asians learned about improved European guns because travelers, traders, and fighters carried them back east again. It was payback, of a kind.

  The Ottomans, who straddled the boundary between Europe and Asia, learned about European guns first. Turkish firepower usually lagged behind European but did stay decades ahead of gunnery in lands farther east and south. It was artillery mounted on wagons that slaughtered Persia’s finest horsemen at Chaldiran in 1514 and Egypt’s at Marj Dabiq two years later, giving the Ottomans mastery of the Middle East.

  A generation later, Muscovy—another state straddling the boundary between Europe and Asia—also learned to apply Western guns. Since the thirteenth century, Russians had been buying survival with annual bribes to the Mongols, but in the sixteenth Tsar Ivan the Terrible took revenge. Russians had learned the basics of gunnery in bloody wars against Sweden and Poland, and Ivan swept down the Volga River, using artillery to smash Mongol stockades in his way. By his death in 1584 he had doubled the size of Moscow’s empire, but this was just the beginning. In 1598, Russian fur trappers armed with newfangled muskets crossed the Ural Mountains; by 1639, they were gazing on the Pacific Ocean.

  Other things being equal, caravans would presumably have carried advanced European guns east along the Silk Roads all the way to China, but they were overtaken by the second great invention of this age—the oceangoing ship.

  As in the case of guns, the basic technology was pioneered in Asia but perfected in Europe. Magnetic compasses, for instance, were in Chinese skippers’ hands by 1119. Picked up by Arab merchants on the Indian Ocean, they reached Italians in the Mediterranean by 1180. Over the next three centuries, East Asian shipwrights made further breakthroughs in rigging, steering, and hull construction. By 1403, China had the world’s first dry docks, housing the biggest sailing ships ever built. Packed with watertight compartments, sealed with waterproof paint, and supported by freshwater tankers, these ships could have gone anywhere Chinese sailors wanted, and between 1405 and 1433 the famous admiral Zheng He led hundreds of them, manned by tens of thousands of sailors, to East Africa, Mecca, and Java.

  Compared with this, Western ships looked very rough-and-ready, but—as with guns—Europeans took Asian ideas in radically different directions. Once again, the driving force was very basic: Europe’s geography presented different challenges from Asia’s, and in trying to rise to them, Europeans found enormous advantages in their relative backwardness.

  Western Europe looked like the worst-placed part of Eurasia’s lucky latitudes in the fifteenth century—just “a distant marginal peninsula,” one economist has called it, far from the real centers of action in South and East Asia. European merchants were acutely conscious of the riches of China and India and for centuries had been seeking easy routes to the booming markets of the Orient. If anything, though, the situation seemed to be getting worse after 1400. The Mongol kingdoms were disintegrating, making the Silk Roads across the steppes more dangerous, while tolls imposed by the Ottomans had made the alternative route (overland from Syria to the Persian Gulf) more expensive. The best solution seemed to be to get to Asia by sailing around the bottom of Africa, bypassing the intervening kingdoms, but no one knew if that was even possible.

  No part of Europe was better placed to find out than Portugal, and in the years after the capture of Ceuta, Portuguese ships nosed their way down Africa’s west coast. It was hard going; oar-powered galleys ruled the roost in the Mediterranean but were ill suited to the distances and winds on the Atlantic. So serious did this seem that Prince Henry, one of the conquerors of Ceuta and third in line to the Portuguese throne, took personal charge of the push to produce better ships.

  The project quickly paid off, in the form of caravels. These tiny ships, typically just fifty to a hundred feet long and displacing barely fifty tons, would have looked ridiculous to Zheng He, but they did the job. Their shallow bottoms could get into silty African river mouths, their square sails made them fast, and their lateen sails made them nimble. In 1420, Portuguese ships discovered Madeira and in 1427 the Azores; within a few years these islands were filled with flourishing plantations. In 1444 sailors reached the Senegal River, giving them access to gold from African mines. In 1473 they crossed the equator, and in 1482 they arrived at the mouth of the mighty Congo (Figure 4.4).

  Figure 4.4. Locations in Africa mentioned in this chapter

  Everything was going famously, but once past the Congo, caravels (and newer, bigger versions called carracks) found themselves facing strong headwinds. Progress stalled, until Europe’s sailors—afraid of nothing—found two solutions. First, in 1487, Bartolomeu Dias hit on the dramatic idea of volta do mar, “returning by sea.” This meant plunging into the uncharted Atlantic in the hope of catching winds that would catapult him past the bottom of Africa. Triumphant, he rounded what we now call the Cape of Good Hope. Dias, however, called it the Cape of Storms (the experience of trying to sleep through some of its howling gales makes me think Dias’s name was the right one), but whatever we call the cape, the Portuguese sailors mutinied rather than go on in such foul weather. It was left to Vasco da Gama, in 1498, to take a second expedition around the bottom of Africa and into the Indian Ocean.

  The second solution, Christopher Columbus’s, was even more drastic. Like all educated Europeans, Columbus knew that the earth was round and that—in theory—by sailing west from Portugal, he would eventually get to the East. Most educated Europeans also knew that the world was about twenty-four thousand miles around, which meant that this route to the Indies was too long to be profitable. Columbus, however, refused to accept this, insisting that three thousand miles of sailing would get him to Japan. In 1492 he finally raised funds to prove his point.

  Columbus went to his grave believing he had sailed to the land of the great khan, but it gradually became clear that his
accidental discovery of a new world was more exciting. There was serious money to be made from shipping America’s wealth—gold, silver, tobacco, even chocolate—back to Europe and shipping Africans to America to produce these fine things. European mariners transformed the Atlantic from a barrier into a highway.

  It was a dangerous highway, though. Like the Mediterranean before the Roman conquest or the steppes before the Mongols, the Atlantic was largely beyond Leviathan’s laws. Once a ship was out of sight of Cádiz or Lisbon, anything went. Anyone with a small ship, a couple of cannons, and no scruples could help himself (or occasionally herself) to the plunder of continents. The golden age of pirates had begun.

  The sixteenth century’s global war on piracy, fought everywhere from the Caribbean to the Taiwan Strait, was yet another asymmetric struggle. Leviathans could always win if they wanted to, but the take, hold, and build strategy that Pompey the Great had invented in the Mediterranean in the first century B.C. cost money. On the whole, governments calculated, putting up with pirates cost less than making war on them, so why bother? Clever bureaucrats could even turn piracy to their own ends, extracting bribes for turning a blind eye or even appointing the cutthroats as “privateers,” legally entitled to rob other countries’ ships. A few unwary voyagers might have to walk the plank, but that seemed a small price to pay.

  The voyagers, however, thought this was a very high price, and so they did the obvious thing: they armed their ships. Caravels and carracks could carry a few cannons, but by 1530 Portuguese shipbuilders were producing a new type, the galleon, which was basically a floating firing platform (Figure 4.5). The galleon’s long and narrow hull, four masts, and small fore- and aftercastles made it fast, but the real gain came from lining its sides with cannons, blasting away from gunports cut in the hull just above the waterline, hurling eight-pound iron balls five hundred yards.