The Pursuit of Power. Technology, Armed Force, and Society since A.D. 1000

118 Chapter Four

Geographical Spread

As we saw in chapter 3, commercial-bureaucratic management of
armed force originated in Italy and then spread to the Low Countries,
France, and Spain. In the course of the seventeenth century this mod­
ern organization of war took root in the Germanies and, with inter­
esting variations, also in Sweden, England, and even in Russia.
The beginnings of the commercialization of military enterprise in
Germany went back to the fourteenth century or before, when Italian
cities hired large numbers of Swiss mountaineers and other Germans
to fight their wars for them. Experience of war in Italy, in turn, under­
lay the successful assertion of Swiss independence in the fourteenth
century. By defeating a force of German knights at Sempach (1387)
Swiss halberdiers and pikemen established their reputation as formi­
dable infantry fighters; in the next century they became the wonder of
all Europe by defeating Charles the Bold’s technologically superior
force no less than three times in 1476 and 1477. Shortly thereafter,
Swiss pikemen entered French service (1479) as mercenary troops and
for a brief period promised to give the French (whose native cavalry
and artillery was already the best in Europe) a clear superiority over all
rivals.^1
Swiss alignment with the French monarchy induced the Flapsburgs
to try to raise German foot soldiers to match the Swiss. Companies of
Landesknechten, equipped like the Swiss but commanded by noblemen
(who also fought on foot), accordingly came into existence, beginning
on a significant scale in the 1490s. But since Maximilian I (emperor
1493–1519) and other German rulers were chronically impecunious,
companies of Landesknechten could look forward to only sporadic
employment. Discharge created a crisis for the soldiers and for the
community in which they happened to be located at the time. The
situation was quite like that which had prevailed in Italy in the early
fourteenth century, before the Italian city-states learned how to
weave effective political and fiscal restraints around professionalized
armed forces.^2

1. As we have already seen, technologically innovative Spanish soldiers swiftly over­
   threw the incipient French hegemony by relying on handguns and developing new
   tactics to take advantage of them. The decisive disaster to the Swiss occurred at the
   hands of their usual allies, the French, in the Battle of Marignano (1515), when suitably
   emplaced artillery fired upon the massed pikemen with devastating effect. Cf. Charles
   Oman, A History of the Art of War in the Middle Ages (London, 1898), 2:279. If Charles
   the Bold had been able to bring his artillery to bear against the Swiss in 1476–77, the
   history of Europe might have taken a very different turn.


2. On Landesknechten see Eugen von Frauenholz, Das Heeresivesen in die Zeit des freien