136 Chapter FourMusket Drill Devised by Maurice of Orange
The engravings on the following pages show eight of a total of forty-three positions
prescribed for Maurice of Orange s musketeers. Getting powder, ball, and wadding
securely into place and then priming the gun while holding a lighted match in the
left hand demanded care and precision; to do it rapidly required repeated practice.
These etchings were published to help drillmasters standardize each motion and thus
speed up the soldiers’ rate of fire.
Wapenhandelinghe van Roers, Musquetten ende Spiessen, Achtervolgende de Ordre van Syn Excellentie
Maurits. Prince van Orangie... Figuirlyck rutgebeelt door Jacob de Gheyn (The Hague, 1607; fac
simile edition, New York: McGraw Hill, 1971).
home ground in the fourteenth century. Egalitarian ideas also cropped
up recurrently among the German Landesknechten.^17
European rulers’ initial response to this dilemma had been to hire
foreign mercenaries for infantry service, since foreigners could be
expected to exhibit minimal solidarity with the lower classes over
whom the ruler in question exercised jurisdiction. The Swiss, egali
tarian and self-governing at home, thus became a pillar of the French
monarchy, helping to prop up an aristocratic-bureaucratic regime for
more than three hundred years (1479–1789) against challengers both
at home and abroad.^18 Hillsmen and others coming from infertile
areas, where a distinct landowning class had never securely established
its power, played analogous roles in other parts of Europe, for exam
ple, the Albanians, Basques, and south Slavic Grenzers, together with
Celts from Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. When the Swedes intervened
in the Thirty Years War, they had something of the same character,
though, of course, they acted on behalf of their own sovereign rather
than as hirelings of a foreign ruler.^19- Cf. Frauenholz, Das Heeresivesen in die Zeit des freien Soldnert urns, 1:36–39– Dis
charged veterans provided key manpower for the Peasants’ War of 1525, for example. - In 14^7 9 Louis XI of France disbanded his French infantry forces and made a
contract with the Swiss instead. The Swiss reputation as the premier pikemen of Europe
undoubtedly influenced this decision; but so did their political distance from French
social turmoils. Cf. Phillipe Contamine, Guerre, état et société à la fin du moyen âge: Etudes
sur les armées des rois de France, 1337–1494 (Paris, 1972), p. 284. On the use of foreign
mercenaries in general see V. G. Kiernan, “Foreign Mercenaries and Absolute Monar
chy,” in Trevor Aston, ed., Crisis in Europe. 1560–1660 (New York, 1967), pp. 117–40.
19–The Ottoman Empire competed with the Venetians from the 1590s for the
mercenary services of Christian infantrymen from the western Balkans. See Halil Inal
cik, “Military and Fiscal Transformation in the Ottoman Empire, 1600–1700,” Ar
chivum Ottomanicum 6 (1980). North of the Black Sea, however, technical and geo
graphical conditions favored cavalry for some two centuries after primacy had passed to
infantry in west European landscapes and battlefields. The cheap horses available on the
steppe allowed mounted Cossacks to play a role in the east analogous to that of the
Swiss in the west. Like the Swiss, they became military egalitarians and wavered be
tween alternative foreign employers once their military value had been recognized