222 Chapter 12by mercenaries. Those townsmen who could afford to,
bought horse and armor and tried to fight like knights.
The majority served with pike or halberd (a long-
handled battle axe) and drilled on Sundays and holi-
days until they achieved a level of effectiveness far
superior to that of peasant levies. The victory of the
Flemish town militias over the chivalry of France at
Courtrai in 1302 was a promise of things to come.
By 1422 pike tactics had been adopted by the
Swiss Confederation, one of several peasant leagues
formed in the later thirteenth century to preserve their
independence from feudal demands. The successful de-
fense of their liberties earned them a formidable mili-
tary reputation, and after 1444 the Swiss were regularly
employed as mercenaries by the French and by the
pope. Their example was taken up by other poor peas-
ants in south Germany who emulated their system of
training and hired themselves out to the emperor and
other princes. Pike squares remained a feature of Euro-
pean armies for two hundred years, and mercenary con-
tracting became an important element in the Swiss and
south German economies.
The emergence of paid troops, new missile
weapons, and massed infantry tactics changed the char-
acter of European warfare. By the end of the fourteenth
century, armies were larger and cavalry was declining in
importance. The social consequences of these changeswere profound because they tended, among other
things, to monetarize the costs of war. In the simplest
form of feudal warfare, cash outlays were few. Men
served without pay and normally provided their own
food and equipment in the field. Feudal levies con-
sumed resources in kind, but these costs rarely involved
the state. This changed dramatically with the advent of
the soldier, because only a sovereign state could coin
money or raise taxes. As feudal nobles could rarely do
either, they gradually lost their preeminent role as the
organizers of war while the eclipse of cavalry reduced
their presence on the battlefield. During the fifteenth
century, many great feudal families began to withdraw
from the traditional function as protectors of society,
leaving the field to men who served the sovereign for
pay and privileges. In the process, the state, too, was
transformed. Where the feudal world had demanded
little more than justice and military leadership from its
kings, the new warfare demanded the collection and
distribution of resources on an unprecedented scale.
The monarchies of Europe were at first unprepared for
such a task, and the difficulties they faced were com-
pounded by a contemporary revolution in military
technology.
The development of Western technology is often
seen as a sporadic affair in which periods of innovation
were interspersed with longer intervals of slow, almostIIllustration 12.2
Pikes in Action. This illustration of the opening of a battle
between formations of pikemen shows the “fall” of pikes as the
units come into action. It is a detail of The Terrible Swiss Warby Al-
brecht Altdorfer, c. 1515.