David Parrott

Cultures of Combat in the Ancien Régime: Linear Warfare, Noble Values, and Entrepreneurship

a century since its publication, the greatest legacy of Michael Robertss seminal article on the Military Revolution has been that it dragged military history out of the backwater of disconnected studies of battles and campaigns into the mainstream of political and social history.1 It did this not by making ground-breaking historical discoveries, but by connecting two previously discrete bodies of thought. On the one hand, Roberts picked up an assertion present in writings about war since the early seventeenth century: that, by drawing upon classical Greek and Roman models of military organization, drill, and tactical deployment, the Orange-Nassau stadtholders of the Dutch Republic had transformed the art of war from the 1590s, and created armies with a clear and permanent military superiority over their traditionally deployed rivals. It was probably the first time since the Romans that a claim for military superiority deriving from technology (weapons, drill, and supporting organization) had been made.2 Roberts buttressed these claims with the no less well-established

The Utility of Fortifications in Early Modern Europe: Italian Princes and Their Citadels, 1540-1640

Considerable attention has been given to the development of new and more sophisticated styles of fortification which spread across early modern Europe, and to the assumed impact of such developments on the character of war and international relations. However, by taking at face value the rhetoric of impregnability attached to massive fortification projects, historians have missed the essential point that fortresses could succeed in their defensive purpose only in conjunction with field armies able to relieve the garrison placed under siege. This essential lesson was ignored by rulers of second- and third-rank states, who constructed fortifications to project both military effectiveness and dynastic status but without incurring the huge and unsustainable additional costs of maintaining an effective field army. The result of such fortification projects - seen in case studies of the Farnese citadel at Piacenza, the Gonzaga at Casale-Monferrato and the dukes of Savoy at Pinerolo - was to undermine an earlier diplomacy based on a careful balancing of the major powers and their interests in Italy. Strategically placed citadels held by rulers without effective field armies presented both an enticement and a danger to the governments of France and Habsburg Spain. The result was a series of pre-emptive strikes which established garrisons of French or Spanish troops within these citadels, often to prevent the other major power doing the same thing, and a drastic curtailment of the freedom of the respective Italian princes.

Book Review: City Walls: The Urban Enceinte in Global Perspective

ing from Mao’s concept of secure base areas not to mention traditional guerrilla recourse to difficult terrain. Bizarrely, Rooney seems to think that the Small Wars Manual was a riposte to Guevara! It is difficult to know precisely what manual he is actually alluding to, since there had been none with such a title published since the second edition in 1940. One might argue the influence of Sandino on Marine Corps practice but there is no mention of Sandino as a guerrilla practitioner anyway. Rooney is prone to inflicting his own idiosyncratic views on the hapless reader. Much global conflict, apparently, has resulted from no leading spiritual leader in the past having had the courage to deny the existence of life after death. Seemingly, each and every guerrilla leader is ‘brilliant’ and all but beyond reproach. Rooney’s partiality also frequently colours his judgement, not least in his discussion of the IRA, consistently characterized as more virtuous than the Protestants of Northern Ireland. In this regard, the use of the word ‘patriots’ between insurgents and terrorists in the subtitle is perhaps significant. It gives this reviewer no pleasure to conclude that, without doubt, this is the worst book on guerrilla warfare he has ever had the misfortune to read. It has absolutely no value for the academic reader and precious little for the general reader, whom it can only seriously mislead.

Book Review: La Bataille de la Montagne Blanche. Un mystique chez les guerriers

Peter Gaunt examines the parliamentary forces’ siege of Montgomery Castle in 1644, leading eventually to the destruction of the castle in 1649. Mark Stoyle looks at the bad image of the Welsh, not unlike that of the Irish, in London in 1642± 46. This preceded rather than resulted from Welsh participation in the royalist army. Here, at least, we ® nd some trace of (supposed) continuity from the twelfth century. The editor tries heroically to draw some general conclusions.

Book Review: Peacemaking in Early Modern Europe: Cardinal Mazarin and the Congress of Westphalia, 1643-1648

Few historians have found the last decade of the Thirty Years War an enticing field of study, and those examining the period after 1640 have focused mainly upon the states of the Holy Roman Empire and the Habsburg lands. Amongst the major belligerents France has been especially neglected, and this has given rise to a number of contradictory assumptions about her conduct of diplomacy and warfare. It is often supposed that the negotiations at Westphalia dragged on for five years after 1643 because the major powers, and France in particular, refused to commit themselves to a single set of demands, remaining hopeful that changing military circumstances would strengthen their bargaining position. Such a view sits uncomfortably with alternative recent assessments of Mazarin as the exponent of balance of power politics, a statesman working for the achievement of a secure European order and a system of collective security. On the military side, most historians appear to agree that armies by the 1640s had outrun the capacity of rulers adequately to administer, pay and supply them. The result was warfare constrained by logistics, which some historians argue led to modest strategies and a preoccupation with territorial control, while others suggest that it led to armies ranging ever more widely in search of food and of territory that had not previously been ravaged. It is this network of assumptions and contradictions that Derek Croxton sets out to examine through his study of the French military and diplomatic effort of the years from 1644 to the end of 1646. He offers both a study of the complex and shifting negotiations between France, Sweden, the emperor and his chief ally, Bavaria, and a reappraisal of the strategy and military operations of the French army of Germany. By bringing these two strands together in a detailed narrative of events, the author offers a significant reappraisal of France’s strategy and war aims and a challenge to recent thinking about the waging of war in the first half of the seventeenth century. Croxton presents a strong case that the French army of Germany in these years was relatively unconstrained by the exigencies of supply. The army was a small force, usually under 10000 men, of whom over 50 per cent would be cavalry, and it possessed aggressive, battle-seeking commanders in Turenne and the prince de Condé. The real constraint upon its action, Croxton argues, was the reluctance of Mazarin and the other ministers to sanction high-risk strategies; previous experience of campaigning, above all

Book Review: The Twilight of a Military Tradition: Italian Aristocrats and European Conflicts, 1560-1800

proposals for the maximum strength of the royal army seem improbably high. If sustaining peaks of 70-80 000 soldiers imposed colossal strains upon the governmental and social fabric of the France of Cardinal Richelieu, it is difficult to accept that the crown in the second and third civil wars, crippled by provincial rejection of tax burdens and the problems of minority rule, could have sustained a military establishment that peaked at 68-72 000 troops, 30-40 per cent larger than the maximums of Fran§ois I and Henri II. However, Wood makes it abundantly clear in other sections of the book that he recognizes that the status of these recruitment targets or maximum strengths is dubious on a number of grounds. Above all, he shows that high attrition rates during the actual campaigns make any attempt to discuss the size of armies over anything longer than a fraction of a campaign meaningless, and provides considerable documentation to show the fluctuation in the size of the royal army during the campaigns, sometimes from week to week. The obvious question raised by Woods study in military failure is how the royal army could be pulled together sufficiently in the 1580s and 1590s to allow Henri IV to force the Catholic League to confront the prospect of defeat at his hands, and indeed to put up a creditable performance against the Spanish armies operating out of the Netherlands. This is obviously another story, but one which Woods book renders considerably more worthy of attention.

Book Reviews : The Age of Battles. The Quest for Decisive Warfare from Breitenfeld to Waterloo. By Russell F. Weigley. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. 1993. xviii + 586 pp. £30.00 boards. ISBN 0 253 36380 2:

The Age of Battles. The Quest for Decisive Warfare from Breitenfeld to Waterloo. By Russell F. Weigley. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. 1993. xviii + 586 pp. £30.00 boards. ISBN 0 253 36380 2. Grand theory has always exercised a considerable attraction for military historians, enticed by the prospect of encompassing centuries of conflict with some tactical and strategic paradigm. Part of this appeal, it may be suspected, lies in the relatively small number of fundamental changes in the character of war throughout history. Professor Weigley suggests that this was certainly the case for the period from the battle of Breitenfeld in 1631 through to Waterloo in 1815, which was marked by no radical innovations in the art of warfare: infantry firearms became more accurate and reliable, artillery could be manoeuvred more easily on the battlefield, but in general little separated the Swedish armies which invaded the Holy Roman Empire under Gustavus II Adolphus from those which conquered Europe for Bonaparte. It is in these conditions, Weigley suggests, that the great set-piece battle came into its own. Weaponry and administration had become sufficiently sophisticated to make practical the organization and deployment of troops in accordance with a strategy aimed at winning

Reviews : R.J. Knecht, Richelieu, London, Longman, 1991; ix + 259 pp.; £17.99 hardback, £8.50 paperback

Cardinal Richelieu’s historical triumph over the opponents of his regime has been matched by his no-less-real historiographical achievement: to a greater extent than any other seventeenth-century statesman, he has succeeded in imposing his version of the events of his ministry onto generations of historians. Richelieu himself went to some lengths to create the image of the far-sighted, selfless and indefatigable architect of

Review Article : The Constraints on Power: Recent Works on Early Modern European History

Geoffrey Parker, The Military Revolution. Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500-1800, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1988, xvii + 234 pp.; £15.00. Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, The Spanish Armada. The Experience of War in 1588, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1988, xii + 300 pp.; £14.95. David C. Goodman, Power and Penury: Government, Technology and Science in Philip II’s Spain, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1988; xi1 + 275 pp.; £30.00. Frederic J. Baumgartner, Henry II: King of France 1547-1559, Durham NC and London, Duke Umversity Press, 1988, xiv + 358 pp.; £37.95. Edmund Leites, ed , Conscience and Casuistry in Early Modern Europe, Cambridge University Press/Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 1988, ix + 269 pp.; £27.50.