Is the Notion of an Early Modern Military Revolution Tenable?

Is the Notion of an Early Modern Military Revolution Tenable?

The notion of an early modern military revolution is one which is a much debated subject among historians. Two historians who are very dominant in this field are Geoffrey Parker and Michael Roberts. Although they both agree that a military revolution occurred, they disagree on the timing of a revolution in war. Roberts argues that a military revolution started in 1560 and "by 1660, the modern art of war had come to birth." Parker, on the other hand, sees the military revolution as a "firmly sixteenth century phenomenon with antecedents in the fifteenth."

Prior to the early modern period, warfare was based around castles and fortified towns and attempts to capture them. This changed very little in the middle ages. Armies had a maximum of forty thousand soldiers, many of whom were mercenaries (1550). Armies consisted of Pike men in square formations supported by cavalry and musketeers. Battles often ended in a stalemate and wars were very lengthy as a result of this. Through the military revolution emerged new tactics, technology and style of warfare. Michael Roberts acknowledged four revolutionary traits of what he called the military revolution. "First, the superiority of disciplined infantry - musketeers rather than pike men - armed and drilled to prosecute a field battle by the ordered application of firepower, not the hurly-burly of man-man combat; second, themanifestly greater size of these new-style, mostly musketeer armies; third, the emergence of bolder, more dramatic strategies designed to seek a decisive battle at the culmination of a sharp campaign; and fourth, a need for larger and more reliable and intrusive commissariats and military bureaucraci...

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...tary revolution occurred is not tenable but the notion that the face of warfare, the order of the world and the way people perceived war changed in this period and has shaped the modern world definitely is tenable.

Bibliography

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H. G. Koenigsberger: Early Modern Europe 1500 - 1789 (The Silver Library) Pearson Education Limited 1987

J. M. Roberts: The Penguin History of Europe Penguin Books 1997

Michael Roberts: The Military Revolution 1560 - 1660 Boulder, CO, 1995

G Parker: The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West 1500 - 1800 Second Edition Cambridge University Press 1996

G Parker Ed: The Cambridge Illustrated History of Warfare Cambridge University Press 1995

Stephen J. Lee: The Thirty Years War TJ Press (Padstow) 1991