Investigations of a Dog

The concept of the “Military Revolution” is the biggest idea to come out of early-modern military history, and also a major claim for the importance of military history. Over the years my attitude towards it has varied between excitement, boredom, and irritation. I sometimes wondered if it was time for military historians to move on and talk about something else. More recently I’ve been thinking about the relationship between military changes and early-modern culture. Looking at the Military Revolution alongside the cultural concepts of “renaissance” and “medieval” gives an interesting perspective.

In 1955, Michael Roberts suggested that changes in strategy, tactics, and weapons technology in Europe between 1550 and 1650 led to bigger and more permanent armies, which required more money and a more centralised bureaucratic administration. Therefore technical changes in the military brought about the growth of centralised states, a shift in the balance of power between monarchs and their subjects, and ultimately a step towards modernity. For these reasons, Roberts considered the changes to be revolutionary.

Even before historians started to become suspicious of metanarratives of progress, this interpretation was challenged and modified in many different ways. Geoffrey Parker was critical of Roberts’s focus on Sweden, the Netherlands, and decisive battles. Parker showed that the Spanish army was not as primitive or ineffective as Roberts initially claimed, but his main argument was that changes in siege warfare were more significant than battle tactics. From this perspective, he placed the revolution in Italy in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, where a new style of fortifications necessitated long sieges with large armies. Jeremy Black placed his military revolution later, focusing on how European powers came to dominate the rest of the world. David Parrott is more sceptical about the whole idea and has demonstrated that the French army in the mid-seventeenth century was neither as innovative nor as efficient as the military revolution theory leads us to expect.

Ian Gentles and James Scott Wheeler have both applied the concept of military revolution to seventeenth century Britain, seeing the New Model Army as a good example of a permanent standing army supported by centralised administration and regular taxation. In my opinion this is a teleological view, since the New Model Army wasn’t intended to be a peacetime standing army and would have been disbanded if it hadn’t revolted against parliament. In contrast to the theoretical model of states gaining more control of their subjects and using armies to further their interests, this is a case of the army taking control of the state and the state being made to serve the interests of the army. Nevertheless, Wheeler made a convincing case that the financial reforms implemented by Parliament from 1643 in order to win the First Civil War had an influence way beyond that aim and played a major part in allowing England/Britain to become a world power.

It isn’t clear whether these financial reforms can be traced back to tactical changes. Nobody has made a serious claim that English Civil War armies were particularly innovative in their tactics or technology, but Wheeler’s thesis is that England’s armies had been keeping pace with the European military revolution since the sixteenth century, but that the government’s financial arrangements had failed to change and were unable to meet the increasing costs of war. I’m not entirely convinced by this either. My own research has played a small part in demonstrating the huge costs of early-modern warfare and the need for financial reforms. The contrast between Parliament’s finances in 1643 and 1645 is striking, even if you don’t see the New Model Army itself as anything particularly new. However, it has to be asked whether there was ever a time when the English monarchy could comfortably meet the costs of war. Anne Curry’s work suggests that Henry V didn’t find it easy to raise enough money for the Agincourt campaign, even though his army was only contracted to serve for a maximum of one year. This raises an interesting point which risks being obscured by teleological obsessions with permanent peacetime standing armies. The shift from disbanding armies at the end of a campaign to keeping them in existence for the duration of the war was an important change in itself, which increased the costs of war, and which incidentally might help to draw a line between “medieval” and “early modern”.

Trying to separate the “medieval” from the “modern” is a difficult, and possibly futile, task. Rigid periodisation stems from and reinforces traditional metanarratives. One of the most persistent and misleading metanarratives is that of the “Renaissance”. This metanarrative says that the middle ages were ended by the rediscovery of classical culture which allowed Europe to progress and become modern. Perhaps this isn’t so much a metanarrative as just a myth (or to put it even more bluntly, a pack of lies), and it’s one which has been successfully attacked by historians on both sides of the medieval/modern divide. The concept of The Renaissance has long since been replaced by renaissances in recognition of the complexity and diversity of European culture. Different countries (and different groups within those countries) experienced different forms of classical revivalism at different times. It is now recognised that there were renaissances during what was traditionally classified as the middle ages.

The myth of the Renaissance appears to have been constructed by renaissance intellectuals in order to distance themselves from the period which they decided to define (retrospectively) as medieval. The new ideology was that civilisation had been corrupted since the fall of the Roman Empire and that a revival of classical culture was a necessary step towards recovery. Paradoxically, the fact that people began believing this myth means that there was a big change in European culture, but not quite in the way they claimed. Many historians now point to continuities between “medieval” and “early-modern” culture, and ways in which the middle ages were not inferior to classical antiquity. Despite all this, the myth of the primitive middle ages lives on in popular culture, and might even be getting worse (if I had a pound for every time someone has described the Taliban, al Quaeda, or US christian fundamentalists as “medieval”…).

Early-modern Europe’s self-conscious classical revivals and rejections of the medieval affected military theory and practice. Michael Roberts pointed out the influence of classical military theory on the tactical reforms of Maurice of Nassau and Gustavus Adolphus. Geoffrey Parker opened his book on the military revolution with a critical examination of renaissance ideology, showing that while many military theorists were heavily influenced by classical writers, others believed that warfare had changed too much for ancient texts to be relevant (The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West 1500-1800; ISBN: 0521479584; you can read the first chapter at Amazon UK).

I think there’s a lot more potential work to be done on putting early-modern warfare in its cultural context. A big part of that context must be the ideology of renaissance. Seventeenth century drill books were often a mixture of sound practical advice, banal platitudes, and pure fantasy. How far were military theorists referencing classical texts simply for the sake of being “Renaissance men” rather than because there was anything useful in them? There was almost certainly a big difference between theory and practice, but did armies emulate the Romans in any ways, and if so, why? Did the military identify with renaissance and classical culture, and consciously reject anything perceived as medieval? Or did officers and cavalrymen consider themselves to be the successors of medieval knights? Were dominant ideologies upheld by wars and armies, or did war open up spaces where ideologies could be contested? Was the need to win wars at all costs a catalyst for cultural change?

There must be some good PhD topics there if anyone’s looking.

Bibliography

1. Jeremy Black, A Military Revolution? (Macmillan Education: Basingstoke, 1991).
2. Anne Curry, Agincourt (Tempus: Stroud, 2005).
3. Ian Gentles, The New Model Army in England, Ireland and Scotland, 1645-1653 (Blackwell: Oxford, 1992).
4. Geoffrey Parker, The Military Revolution (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1988).
5. David Parrott, Richelieu’s Army (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2001).
6. Michael Roberts, The Military Revolution, 1560-1660 (Queen’s University: Belfast, 1956).
7. James Scott Wheeler, The Making of a World Power (Sutton: Stroud, 1999).