94 Chapter Threeutilize the firepower that muskets and arquebuses began to exhibit in
battle. The French failure in Italy, in fact, can be attributed largely to
an excessive reliance on Swiss pikemen, heavy cavalry, and their fa
mous siege guns. The Spanish were readier than the French to exper
iment with musketry as a supplement to pike formations and proved
especially adept at making use of field fortification to protect infantry
from cavalry attack.
As a result, the so-called Spanish tercios emerged from the Italian
wars as the most formidable field force in Europe. A tercio comprised a
mass of pikemen who protected a fringe of musketeers posted around
the central square of pikes. This formation proved capable of with
standing cavalry attack in the open field and could charge an enemy
with lowered pikes just as effectively as the Swiss, who had invented
this tactic. Only occasionally did artillery play much of a role in battles;
it was too difficult to get heavy guns to the battlefield in time.
The tactics of the Spanish tercios gave a decisive battlefield role to
infantry, not only in defense but in attack as well. Until the sixteenth
century the prestige of knighthood in battle had lingered stubbornly,
especially in France and Germany, where knighthood was deeply
rooted in the social structure of the countryside. But after 1525 or so,
the idea that a gentleman could fight on foot with almost as much
dignity as if he were mounted became irresistible in practice, even
among the French and Germans. Cavalry, after all, had almost no role
in siege warfare, which became the principal growing point in the art
of war for the ensuing half-century.
Despite all the skill brought to bear on the art of combining differ
ent arms and formations in battle to achieve success, Spanish victories
in the field always fell short of assuring a general supremacy for the
Hapsburg cause. As long as the defeated party had a multitude of
prepared fortifications to fall back upon, where the shattered rem
nants of a field force could take refuge and expect to resist for many
months, even a series of victories did not suffice to establish
hegemony.
Hence, the superiority of Spanish soldiers in battle, although it did
allow Charles V to drive the French from Italy, did not allow him to
overthrow the independent power of the French monarchy. Nor was
he able to suppress the autonomy of German princes or the diverse
local immunities of his Netherlandish subjects, even when they began
to espouse various forms of Protestant heresy. As a result, perpetual
competition among European states continued to provoke sporadic