Was it the technological or tactical changes which had the greater influence in determining the course of the Hapsburg-Valois Wars?

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E. Fry

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Was it the technological or tactical changes which had the greater influence in determining the course of the Hapsburg-Valois Wars?

Most historians believe that between 1300 and 1648, a military revolution took place, and the main part of it occurred during the course of the Hapsburg – Valois Wars. However it is a cause of fierce debate as to whether it was changes in tactics or changes in military technology which determined the course of the wars.

Charles VIII of France initiated a costly and prolonged dynastic war when he invaded Italy in 1494. Until 1559, the Spanish would contest French domination of the peninsula as a shifting array of Italian city-states allied themselves with one side or the other. This conflict constituted part of the Valois-Habsburg wars—so named after the names of the ruling families of France and Spain, respectively.

Large-scale battles were exceptional because of their risk, which was enhanced by the development of fortification. An enemy defeated in the field was likely to escape decisive consequences by withdrawing behind defences whose reduction involved massive expenses of time and effort.

Medieval warfare therefore tended towards a process of small-scale manoeuvres, raids, and skirmishes based on regional networks of fortifications. This attritional model in turn highlighted the familiar limitations of feudal levies: short service and organizational entropy. Warfare had become too complex, too sophisticated, and too low-key to be sustained effectively by temporarily assembled bands of agonistic heroes. Tactical considerations reinforced strategic factors in making high demands on the solidarity and flexibility of field forces. Medieval commanders were by no means indifferent to the problems and opportunities posed by flanks. They were correspondingly concerned with being able to move formed bodies of men from place to place in a hurry.

Cohesion, in short, became an increasingly important element of medieval armed forces. Medieval Europe was a society organized for war, whose focal point was the armoured horseman, the knight. Expensive technical improvements in armour and in horse breeding, combined with the difficulty of mobilizing capital resources in a subsistence economy, set knights increasingly apart from other fighters. To the price of knightly equipment were added the costs, material and psychological, of knightly professionalism. The horsemanship necessary to manage a stallion in battle; the ability to use sword, mace, or lance effectively, whether mounted or on foot - these skills reflected early training and a lifetime's practice. They were vital in a conflict and difficult to replace after heavy defeats, Agincourt and the ensuing French military ineffectiveness is an example of this.

Medieval armies also lacked anything like a comprehensive command structure able to evoke general, conditioned responses. Coherence depended on mutual loyalties far more than on discipline, drill, or fear of punishment. However all this was due to change influenced by a growing awareness that armoured horsemen were not in fact invulnerable. As early as the twelfth century, the cities of Flanders and northern Italy were beginning to produce foot soldiers able to defeat the best of the mounted chivalry. In 1176, it was the infantry of the Lombard League that broke the charge of Frederick Barbarossa's knights, then counter–attacked to drive the Germans from the field of Legnano. Through the thirteenth century, the footmen of the Low Countries enabled their cities to maintain and enhance their power vis-à-vis the local nobility, a process culminating with the destruction of a French knightly army at Courtrai in 1303. But these soldiers were at best part time and as a result were limited. They did not have complicated manoeuvres, and their operational effectiveness depended on levels of involvement in war that went against the aims of a medieval city state, which was based mainly on commerce. Therefore warfare, which disrupted trade, was a thing to be avoided if possible, and so the quality of the combatants suffered as a result.

However as it became necessary to be ready for the increasingly likely chances of war, the military world took its cue from the area that most were familiar with, a specialization of labour. If each task had its specific skill, taught and supported by specific guilds, it was therefore logical for the military to follow suit and it is from this that professional armies start to arise. From a few experienced captains and armorers held on retainer, the permanent armed forces of Europe's cities and city-states tended to increase during the fourteenth century to fairly substantial sizes.

The character of the Hapsburg-Valois wars was largely determined by technical developments. New weapons demanded new tactics; new tactics dictated changes in the composition of an army. Again, new weapons, by forcing a changed attitude to battle, affected strategy and the length of campaigns. The development of fortifications was particularly vital in altering the way battle was carried out, for the change in the tempo of warfare brought about by this science was the most important single influence on sixteenth-century strategy. When armies could render themselves almost invulnerable by carefully designed temporary fortifications in the field, and when city walls became stronger than the guns of a besieger, then a war of movement, of pitched battles sought and accepted and victory in the field leading to the quick capture of cities, which had occurred during Charles VIII’s initial invasion, was no longer possible.

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These developments can be placed under two categories, the rise of infantry power and the dominance that foot soldiers came to exercise on the battlefield, and the simultaneous emergence of artillery and its impact on fortification design. In the 1470s, the creation of disciplined infantry formations based on the old Roman and Greek phalanx was then developed by Cordoba and Pescara. The result of this new accession of infantry was Hapsburg domination of warfare in the 1520s leading up to c1530.

Artillery briefly completely changed the face of warfare. Mediaeval warfare, dominated by castle defence and siege warfare, was now ...

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