Is the Notion of an Early Modern Military Revolution Tenable? Essays

Is the Notion of an Early Modern military Revolution Tenable?The notion of an early modern forces variation is one which is a much debated subject among historians. Two historians who are very dominant in this field are Geoffrey Parker and Michael Roberts. Although they both agree that a military revolution occurred, they disagree on the timing of a revolution in contend. Roberts argues that a military revolution started in 1560 and by 1660, the modern art of war had come to birth. Parker, on the other hand, sees the military revolution as a firmly sixteenth century pheno manpoweron with antecedents in the fifteenth. Prior to the early modern period, warfare was based around castles and fortified towns and attempts to capture them. This changed very little in the middle ages. Armies had a maximum of forty thousand soldiers, many of whom were mercenaries (1550). Armies consisted of Pike men in square formations supported by cavalry and musketeers. Battles often ended in a stale mate and wars were very lengthy as a yield of this. Through the military revolution emerged new tactics, technology and style of warfare. Michael Roberts acknowledged four revolutionary traits of what he called the military revolution. First, the superiority of disciplined infantry - musketeers quite a than pike men - armed and drilled to prosecute a field battle by the ordered application of firepower, not the hurly-burly of man-man combat second, themanifestly greater surface of these new-style, mostly musketeer armies third, the emergence of bolder, more dramatic strategies designed to seek a decisive battle at the culmination of a sharp campaign and fourth, a need for larger and more reliable and intrusive commissariats and military bureaucraci... ...tary revolution occurred is not tenable but the notion that the face of warfare, the order of the world and the mood people perceived war changed in this period and has shaped the modern world definitely is tenable.Bibliography Jeremy Black Ed European warfarefare 1453 - 1815 (Problems in Focus) Macmillan hole Limited 1999H. G. Koenigsberger Early Modern Europe 1500 - 1789 (The Silver Library) Pearson Education Limited 1987J. M. Roberts The Penguin History of Europe Penguin Books 1997Michael Roberts The Military Revolution 1560 - 1660 Boulder, CO, 1995G Parker The Military Revolution Military Innovation and the Rise of the West 1500 - 1800 Second Edition Cambridge University Press 1996G Parker Ed The Cambridge Illustrated History of Warfare Cambridge University Press 1995Stephen J. Lee The Thirty Years War TJ Press (Padstow) 1991