Advances in Europe’s Art of War, 1600–1750 13711,
Hold up your musket and present12,
Give fireReliance on foreigners had obvious drawbacks, however. Before
the eighteenth century, money was not usually available in anything
like the amount needed to pay armed foreigners punctually. Chroni
cally impecunious monarchs could not safely rely on an army that was
prepared to quit the battlefield simply because its pay was overdue.^20
But from the beginning of the seventeenth century, European rulers
discovered how the sweepings of city streets and sons of poverty-
stricken peasants could quite literally be made into new men by re
peated drilling. Egalitarian ideas lost their resonance, save on those
rare occasions when the drillmasters espoused such ideals, as hap
pened briefly in some units of the Parliamentary armies during the
among neighboring states. In the end the Cossacks affiliated with the Russian tsars but
only at the price of betrayal of their earlier egalitarian tradition. Cf. William H.
McNeill, Europe's Steppe Frontier, 1500–1800 (Chicago, 1964).- In Islamic lands, similar difficulties had sometimes been met by reducing foreign
soldiers to the status of slaves; but a slave soldier, too, was hard to control, and in
several Islamic states slave captains seized power in their own right, founding “slave
dynasties” in which power passed from slave captain to slave captain instead of from
father to son. The Mameluke state of Egypt was the most famous of these; it lasted from
the thirteenth to the nineteenth century. On slave soldiery in Islam see David Ayalon,
“Preliminary Remarks on the Mamluk Military Institution in Islam,” in Parry and Yapp,
War, Technology, and Society in the Middle East, pp. 44–58; Daniel Pipes, Slave Soldiers
and Islam (New Haven, 1981); Patricia'Crone, Slaves on Horses: The Evolution oj the
Islamic Polity (New York, 1980).