Soldiers of the fourteenth century found the mysterious power released by gunpowder far too volatile to treat it with anything but distant respect. Using it even in a primitive cannon, discharged by the application of the hot end of a long taper to the touchhole, must have demanded remarkable courage from a daring individual, all the more so if we realise that early cannon often burst from shock. To utilise gunpowder as the propellant force in a missile-throwing weapon held in the hands required, therefore, the passage of a high threshold of mistrust, anxiety and outright fear. By the mid-fifteenth century, however, some European soldiers were beginning to experiment with such a firearm and by 1550 it had come into quite general use.
The intermediary in the psychological process that allowed the soldier to move from a detached to an intimate relationship with the gunpowder weapon was the crossbow, a mechanical device which, as its clockwork was wound against a spring, stored enough energy to discharge a heavy bolt with narrow accuracy and to long range when a release mechanism, a trigger, was pulled. The crossbow, found in Chinese tombs of the fourth century BC, did not appear in Europe until the end of the thirteenth century AD, and may have been local in conception. During the fourteenth century, it came into common use on the battlefield as a potent weapon of war, most of all because of its bolt’s power to penetrate armour at medium and short range.
The mechanism and shape of the crossbow readily lent itself to adaptation for gunpowder use. The crossbow’s stock, which was held against the shoulder and had to be strong enough to support the sudden shock of the spring’s release, provided a pattern for a similar wooden shape into which a lightened cannon barrel could be laid; the crossbow’s recoil, when the trigger was pulled, would have accustomed its user to the sort of blow against the shoulder a firearm threw at the moment of detonation. The first users of firearms may well have been crossbowmen.
Commanders had never quite known, however, how best to employ crossbowmen on the battlefield, as opposed to at a siege, and they found the same difficulty with users of firearms. During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the English used longbowmen to great effect, but the longbow was a demanding weapon that few men had the patience to master — usually they were from remote and rustic areas; as with the composite bow, the best was brought out of it by peoples with time on their hands. The pike, or thrusting spear, was a simpler tool of war, and in the hands of hardy and fractious peasant communities from areas where the knightly class was small, such as Switzerland, could be wielded to oppose a dense barrier to cavalry attack, as long as the pikemen kept their nerve in the face of a charge. The Swiss acquired a reputation for fearlessness as pikemen and by it won during the fifteenth century both a high measure of independence from their Habsburg overlords and a name for steadfastness that brought them a living as the leading mercenaries of Europe during the next 300 years. At the ‘mad battle’ of St Jacob-en-Birs (1444), for example, a party of 1500 Swiss pikemen forced their way into the centre of a French army 30,000 strong and fought until all had been killed. In their battles with the Burgundians, fighting on more equal terms — Granson and Morat (1476), Nancy (1477) — they employed the same headlong phalanx-like tactics and won a series of victories that destroyed Burgundian power for good.
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 courageous 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