European Weapons and Warfare 1618–1648

"That’s why I picked it. This period of the Thirty Years War is very visual, in the sense that it sees a massive expansion of print media and the first regular newspapers. All this is propelled by the war. But these illustrated broadsheets are produced as much for propaganda purposes as for pure information. There are some fantastic engravers producing panoramic battle scenes and so forth. So there’s a great wealth of material, and this book is based on those illustrations and on surviving items of equipment from the war. It provides a very good compendium of what the armies looked like, what their military equipment looked like, to a level of detail that’s generally missing. For example, it shows you what the baggage wagons looked like. In the very influential ‘military revolution thesis’ first advanced in the 1950s, it’s supposed to have done that, yes. But I’m sceptical. It’s much more of an evolutionary process over the course of the war and there are some developments that are specific to this conflict. Because of the interlinking between military operations, the need to hold territory to resource armies, and the peace negotiations, the field armies actually change composition so that they become predominantly cavalry forces by the end of the war. That is totally at odds with the general European trend and isn’t replicated in any later conflict. But in the Thirty Years War, armies needed to be mobile to respond to the needs of the diplomats and cavalry could forage more easily, too. Cavalry could pitch up in an area, draw out infantry from the garrisons in the towns, make up an army and then fight a battle. That trend is not replicated in the wars that, for example, the Spanish and French are fighting at the same time, and it is not replicated after the war, where the trend is towards infantry and relying on infantry fire power. I think when we look at the detail, we see some things are part of a general trend, but it’s a trend rather than a revolution. Other things are particular to the conflict and are peculiar to it. This is one of the things that you can tell from Wagner’s book. He shows all the different troop types, how each type of soldier is armed in a specific way. Battles were fought with a combination of different types of soldier. Infantry included pikemen who were more heavily armoured and had pikes to protect the musketeers against cavalry attack, because reloading firearms was a fairly slow process. There were different types of cavalry: light cavalry for scouting and harassing the enemy and plundering their baggage and causing panic, and heavy cavalry that were meant to attack infantry formations that had lost cohesion. Most of the casualties in battles actually occurred towards the end, when one side broke. If one side’s formations lost cohesion, then soldiers were exposed individually. A pike on its own is very unwieldy and they are only effective en masse . Much the same can be said for contemporary firearms. Yes, there are all sorts of statistics. The Holy Roman Empire’s population is reduced by about 20%, but more than a fifth of the population died. Overall numbers are difficult to estimate. The major killer is the plague, which was spread by troop movements. The worst period is the 1630s, when the war becomes truly general throughout the Empire and the armies are moving fairly rapidly. One contingent brought the plague into the German part of the Empire from Northern Italy. Malnourishment, due to the disruption of agriculture and trade, left people vulnerable. These were much more likely causes of death than direct killing. Direct killing was usually much more situational, specific and often used as a terror tactic: you murdered the servant in order to get a householder to reveal where they had buried their treasure."