The Business of War in Europe, 1000–1600 83
English from France by 1453 after a series of successful campaigns.
The same force allowed Louis XI (1461–83) to take possession of a
large part of the inheritance of Charles the Bold of Burgundy after
that ruler met his death in a battle against the Swiss (1477). The
kingdom of France thus emerged on the map of Europe between 1450
and 1478, centralized as never before and capable of maintaining a
standing professional army of about 25,000 men year in and year out,
with an extreme upper limit of 80,000 available for mobilization in
time of crisis.^14
Mere numbers, however, do not tell the tale. The French army that
drove the English out of Normandy and Guienne, 1450–53, did so by
bringing heavy artillery pieces to bear on castle walls, one after
another, whereupon previously formidable defenses came tumbling
down in a matter of hours, if the garrison did not prefer to surrender.
A century of rapid development of cannon design lay behind this dra
matic demonstration of the power gunpowder weapons had attained.
From the very beginning, the explosive suddenness with which a
gun discharged somehow fascinated European rulers and artisans. The
effort they put into building early guns far exceeded their effective
ness, since, for more than a century after 1326, catapults continued to
surpass anything a gun could do, except when it came to making noise.
Yet this did not check experimentation.^15
The first important change in gun design was to substitute a spheri
cal shot (usually made from stone) for the arrowlike projectiles of the
earliest guns. This went along with a shift from the early vase shape to
a tubular design for the gun itself, allowing expanding gases from the
- These figures come from Contamine, Guerre, état et société, pp. 317–18. In 1478
France’s 4,142 “lances” outnumbered Milan’s more than 4 to 1. This offers a rough
measure of the way in which the French monarchy had outstripped the Italian city-state
scale of war by the close of the fifteenth century. Ibid., p. 200.
- Cf. Thomas Esper, “The Replacement of the Longbow by Firearms in the English
Army,” Technology’ and Culture 6 (1965): 382–93. Sexual symbolism presumably at
tached itself to guns from the beginning, and perhaps goes far to explain European
artisans’ and rulers’ irrational investment in early firearms. I owe this idea to Barton C.
Hacker, who explored parallel psychological drives behind the development of tanks in
the interwar decades in “The Military and the Machine: An Analysis of the Controversy
over Mechanization in the British Army, 1919–1939” (Ph.D. diss., University of
Chicago, 1968). Yet even if this sort of psychological resonance explains otherwise
unintelligible behavior, it does not explain why Europeans were especially susceptible.
The character of western Europe’s political institutions and the militaristic habits of
urban dwellers who manufactured (and paid for) the new guns seem necessary factors in
converting psychological drives from mere fantasy into hard metal. Cf. J. R. Hale,
“Gunpowder and the Renaissance: An Essay in the History of Ideas,” in Charles H.
Carter, ed., From Renaissance to Counter-Reformation: Essays in Honor of Garret Mattingly
(London, 1966), pp. 133–34.
