93: Forged in Fire and Steel: Warfare and the Making of Early Modern Europe

Welcome back to the I Take History With My Coffee podcast where we explore history in the time it takes to drink a cup of coffee.


Raymond de Beccaric, Lord of Fourquevaux, Instructions on the War, 1548
“For that, the towns enclosed with weak walls of stone, and defended with small, square, or round towers, are insufficient to abide the malice and offense that an enemy at this day may put in practice, the can­non being an engine of much more force than any before it was invented.”


It's June 1513—a plain outside the town of Novara in northern Italy. Thousands of men are moving across the field, not in a mob but in formation — a dense square bristling with ash poles, each five meters long. They are Swiss infantry, the most feared soldiers in Europe. They are moving fast. Faster than you'd expect. And they are almost entirely silent.

There are no trumpets. No war cries. Just the tramp of boots and the low forest sound of thousands of pike shafts clicking together. The French cavalry on the flanks doesn't charge. The French artillery crew runs. Because every professional soldier on that field knows what happens when that square hits you.

It hits you like a brick wall.

The Swiss will win at Novara. Convincingly, brutally, as they had at Grandson and Murten in 1476, at Schwaderloh and Dornach in 1499, and at a dozen other engagements over four decades. For roughly forty years, no army in Europe had found a reliable way to stop them.

So how do you stop something like that? 

That’s the question European commanders spent forty years trying to answer. 

This episode explores that change — how European warfare transformed between roughly 1420 and 1600, told through four interlocking stories: the rise and fall of the pike, the gunpowder revolution, the new science of fortification, and the historians’ argument about what it all means. Was it a revolution? Or something slower, messier, and more interesting?

The Italian Wars, from 1494 to 1559, are where the story comes into focus. When Charles VIII of France invaded the peninsula in 1494 with a siege train of more than forty horse-drawn bronze guns, he didn't just topple fortresses — he revealed the bankruptcy of an entire military system that had taken centuries to build. Italy became the laboratory where every major power tested their weapons, formations, and doctrine against one another in sixty-five years of nearly continuous war. Almost everything we're going to talk about today was forged in that furnace.

Let's start with a misconception, because misconceptions are where good history begins.

The Swiss pike is usually described as an anti-cavalry weapon, a hedge of spearpoints that horses won't charge. It could function that way, but that's not why it was dominant. The pike's primary value was offensive: delivering overwhelming physical and psychological shock to enemy infantry formations. Historian Olivier Bangerter puts it bluntly — intimidation worked as well as, if not better than, the physical effect of the pikes themselves. Many battles were decided before the two formations ever made contact.

Think about what the weapon actually was: mostly ash, about five meters long, with only the front three or four ranks able to level their pikes for contact — everyone behind pushing forward, adding weight and momentum to the mass. This was not a weapon. This was a formation. A collective instrument whose power depended entirely on cohesion, discipline, and the willingness of thousands of men to stay together and keep moving.

What’s fascinating is that the Swiss were internally resistant to it. Individual soldiers preferred the halberd — a shorter, more flexible weapon that let them do what soldiers throughout history have wanted to do after a battle, namely, loot the dead. Zurich was still threatening legal sanctions against men who forgot to bring their pikes as late as 1515. In 1512, Swiss commanders on campaign had to request additional pikes from Milanese allies because their own men had brought too many halberds. The canton’s elite fighting force, the envy of every army in Europe, had to be legally coerced into carrying its signature weapon.

When the formation worked, it was almost unstoppable. From the 1470s to the 1510s, the Swiss square met no real match on European battlefields—forty-plus years of dominance.

Here's the problem with any weapon system that depends entirely on formation: the formation is also the source of every vulnerability.

There were three principal ways to break a pike square, and each exploited a structural limitation inherent in the very feature that made it powerful.

The first strategy focused on flank exploitation. While an advancing square is highly effective from the front, it is nearly defenseless from the sides—changing the formation to redirect thousands of pikes sideways forces the entire unit to halt and reorient. A cavalry attack on this exposed flank could lead to disastrous chaos. 

The second tactic involved a frontal breach: if soldiers with shorter weapons managed to close within the pikes’ range, the long spearheads would become more of a liability than an advantage.

The third, and ultimately the most important, was ranged weapons fired from protected positions. A pike square is necessarily a large, dense, slow-moving target. Improving artillery could tear gaps in it at range. But the decisive innovation came from the Spanish, who combined firearms with fieldcraft in a way that would reshape European warfare for the next century.

At Cerignola in 1503 and at Bicocca in 1522, Spanish arquebusiers fired from behind earthworks and ditches. The approaching Swiss couldn’t run fast enough. At Bicocca, three thousand of the eight thousand Swiss soldiers died in a single engagement. Spanish losses were negligible.

The Spanish lesson from the Italian Wars was that no single weapon was decisive. Rather, it was that the combination was everything.

The Spanish tercio, formalized in the 1530s, institutionalized that lesson. Three troop types formed the core: pikemen in dense blocks for shock, arquebusiers and musketeers for ranged fire, and, early on, rodeleros — sword-and-buckler fighters who could break into a pike formation at close quarters, in the same gap-breaking role that halberdiers played in other armies. The arquebusiers weakened and disrupted the enemy formation at range; the pike completed the work; the rodelero exploited any breach.

The architect of this synthesis was Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba — known to history as El Gran Capitán. Pavia in 1525 was the showcase where Spanish-led Imperial forces captured Francis I of France. The tercio system had arrived and would remain the dominant infantry formation in European warfare for a century, until Gustavus Adolphus and the Dutch reformers began to thin and lengthen it, trading mass for maneuverability.

One footnote on the pike worth carrying forward: it didn’t disappear when the musket arrived. Musketeers reloading for thirty seconds to a minute were vulnerable to cavalry — they needed the pike block’s protection. The pike only became redundant when the bayonet, in the late seventeenth century, allowed the musket to double as a spear—over two hundred years from first rise to final obsolescence. Technology rarely wins as cleanly or as quickly as it promises.

Speaking of muskets, the phrase 'gunpowder revolution' implies a sudden transformation. The reality is considerably messier, considerably slower.

Gunpowder weapons were not a fifteenth-century invention. Hand-held bombards were recorded in Italy in 1364; by the 1380s, Italian city walls were already mounting cannon. The technology had been present, spreading, and improving for over a century before it became genuinely decisive on the battlefield.

What changed in the second half of the fifteenth century was engineering. Cast-bronze guns replaced the old stave-and-hoop construction, producing reliable and powerful pieces. The trunnion-mounted two-wheeled carriage made artillery mobile — no longer a static siege piece wrestled into position and left there, but a gun that could be repositioned during an engagement.

The result was Charles VIII's invasion of Italy in 1494: a siege train of more than forty horse-drawn guns capable of reducing a medieval wall in hours rather than the weeks or months a traditional siege would take. The Italian states had no answer. The fortress on the Neapolitan frontier that had resisted attack for seven years fell in eight hours. The Venetian Senate watched what was happening and, in 1498, declared that artillery now dominated war. They weren't entirely wrong. They were just slightly ahead of the evidence.

Because in open battle, artillery’s record was considerably more mixed. Well into the fifteenth century, field guns were slow to deploy, inaccurate, and as likely to cause friendly confusion from smoke as to inflict enemy casualties. Burgundian artillery at Murten in 1476 reportedly hit four mounted men. Swabian artillery at Schwaderloh was so inaccurate that its own smoke inadvertently screened the Swiss advance.

When artillery worked on a battlefield, it did so spectacularly. But it worked best against massed, slow-moving targets — which is exactly what the pike square was. The Spanish lesson at Cerignola and Bicocca combined firearms with earthwork defense. And Marignano in 1515 would demonstrate what happened when a commander orchestrated artillery, cavalry, and prepared positions against the finest infantry formation in Europe. 

The trajectory from artillery as a novelty to a battle-winning arm was gradual and cumulative. By the time Gustavus Adolphus fielded eighty guns at Breitenfeld in 1631, standardized across three calibers, with regimental three-pounders capable of twenty rounds an hour, the system had matured beyond recognition.

The same slow curve applies to hand firearms. The arquebus appeared in the mid-fifteenth century but remained secondary to bows and pikes well into the sixteenth century. It was slow to load, unreliable in wet weather, and had an effective range that barely exceeded that of a competent crossbowman. What it had — what made it eventually decisive — was that anyone could learn to use it in weeks. A longbowman required years of conditioning you couldn’t shortcut. You couldn’t mass-produce longbowmen. You could mass-produce arquebusiers.

The musket, introduced by Spanish regiments in Italy in the 1550s, extended range and penetration — it could punch through plate armor at a hundred meters. But a musketeer reloading a matchlock took thirty seconds to a minute. In that time, cavalry could cover enormous ground, and an advancing pike square could close to contact range. The answer was collective fire discipline: the volley and the countermarch.

In the 1590s, Maurice of Nassau and his cousin, William Louis of Orange, developed a rotating musketeer-firing system. The front rank fires, then steps back to reload while the next advances, enabling continuous fire. William Louis detailed this method in a December 1594 letter, and Jacob de Gheyn included it in a 1607 drill manual. The tactic quickly spread throughout Europe, as in the competitive multi-state landscape of early modern Europe, any tactical edge that enhanced survival was promptly adopted or risked obsolescence.

One more dimension connects everything that follows. The gunpowder revolution was not just tactical. It was fiscal.

French royal artillery consumed roughly twenty thousand pounds of powder per year in the 1440s and five hundred thousand pounds a century later — a twenty-fivefold increase. The gunpowder age required new professionals — military engineers, gun founders, ballistics experts, fortress architects — who demanded patronage and salaries that medieval household arrangements could not provide. War was becoming something only states with serious administrative and financial capacity could sustain. And the demands of war were pushing states to build that capacity. The cause and the consequence were the same thing.

Artillery addressed one issue but introduced a new one. While it was now possible to demolish medieval walls in hours, the longstanding landscape of European warfare—characterized by fortified towns and castles influencing campaign routes, supply chains, and strategic options—became unpredictable. As a result, a different kind of wall was necessary.

The old walls were wrong in every respect: tall enough to be unstable under bombardment, vertical enough to be easy targets, and built of stone that shattered into lethal fragments rather than absorbing impact.

The answer came partly from theory and partly from accident. Leon Battista Alberti, writing in the 1440s, proposed low, angled, saw-toothed defensive lines, arguing that a star-shaped configuration would produce overlapping fields of fire that eliminated the blind spots exploited by medieval siege techniques. This was theory. The accident came at Pisa in 1500, when defenders discovered that compacted earth absorbed cannon shot in ways masonry could not. A ball that shattered stone buried itself in an earthen rampart and stopped.

The trace italienne combined low, thick earthen ramparts that absorbed bombardment and projecting angular bastions from the main wall, allowing defenders to cover the perimeter with flanking fire and eliminate dead ground. A deep ditch, covered by a bastion’s guns, made it nearly impossible to approach. Military architect Francesco Laparelli stated it flatly: it was impossible to defend a place against artillery without bastions. A system, refined over centuries by medieval engineers, became obsolete in a generation.

The trace italienne's strategic implications were profound and paradoxical.

The new fortresses were extraordinarily expensive to build — the pentagonal citadel at Antwerp, commissioned in 1567, took more than three years to complete at record speed. But once built, they were extraordinarily difficult to take. Where old walls had fallen in hours to Charles VIII’s guns, the new bastioned fortress could hold for months or years against the best siege artillery in Europe.

The strategic consequence was that siege warfare became dominant over pitched battle wherever the trace italienne had spread. Geoffrey Parker has cited Roger Boyle’s calculation: twenty sieges for every pitched battle during the Low Countries Wars of 1572 to 1648. Even Marlborough, fighting in the following century, conducted thirty sieges to four battles.

Consider the Habsburgs. Charles V had the best infantry in Europe and the financial resources of the Fuggers and New World silver. Yet he could not consolidate his empire because, wherever he turned, he found bastioned fortresses that could not be taken quickly enough. The French, the Dutch, and German princes — by the 1530s and 1540s, the very fortress system Italian engineers had developed in response to invasion was protecting everyone from everyone else.

Yet the trace italienne spread unevenly, and that unevenness matters because it explains why different theaters of war looked so different.

Adoption was fastest where it was most urgently needed: the flat, low-lying terrain of northern Italy, the Netherlands, and France’s northern frontier, where artillery was easiest to deploy and existing defenses were most exposed. In rugged terrain, older-style defenses retained value longer.

Before 1618, Germany had few bastioned fortresses, which is why the Thirty Years’ War — fought largely on German soil — featured far more open-field battles and rapid strategic marches than wars in the Low Countries. In the Netherlands, wars lasted decades because every position was fortified and every fortification had to be taken or masked.

But here's a cautionary tale: the Republic of Siena fell in 1555, not because its armies were defeated in battle, but because it had spent so much on unfinished bastioned fortifications that it lacked a viable army. The system meant to defend states from conquest drained its resources until it could no longer resist. The fiscal logic of the trace italienne favored large, wealthy, and well-administered states while punishing smaller ones. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, this new military architecture was as influential in shaping Europe's political map as any battlefield.

Now for the harder question. 

Historians have debated for seventy years whether what we've been describing constitutes a genuine 'Military Revolution.' The debate is worth spending time on, not because historians need the attention, but because how you frame the question determines what you see in the evidence.

The thesis was coined in 1956 by Michael Roberts. He argued that a revolutionary transformation in European warfare occurred between 1560 and 1660, driven by Dutch and Swedish tactical innovations — drill, volley fire, and smaller, more maneuverable units. New tactics required larger, more disciplined armies. Larger armies demanded new financial and administrative institutions. Those institutions produced the modern centralized state. Warfare made the state, and the state was remade by warfare. It's a clean, elegant causal chain.

Geoffrey Parker extended and complicated the thesis. He added the trace italienne as a primary driver of growth in army size — all those garrisons, all those siege trains. He pushed the chronology back to the Italian Wars, recognizing that the Spanish tercios, not the Dutch reformers, were the first practitioners of the tactical system Roberts had attributed to Maurice of Nassau. He linked European military changes to global dominance, arguing that the same innovations that restructured European warfare also explained why European powers could project force worldwide. For Parker, a tenfold increase in army sizes between 1530 and 1710 was confirmed without reservation. The cause, he argued, was structural: the trace italienne and the fiscal-administrative capacity required to sustain it.

Jeremy Black has been the most persistent and effective critic of the military revolution concept. He argues that it is a broad, imprecise term that is heavily Western-centric and relies on technological determinism, suggesting weapons drive political and social change. He emphasizes the importance of ‘pull' factors, such as strategic culture, political aims, and specific objectives underlying military use. Different navies and armies had distinct roles, operated in varied terrains, and faced different political constraints, meaning there was no universal ‘best practice' defining a revolution. Furthermore, the evidence supporting Western military superiority globally is weaker than Parker claimed. For instance, the Dutch were ousted from Taiwan in 1662 by Koxinga’s forces, and the Portuguese lost Fort Jesus in Mombasa to Arab forces in 1698. His conclusion is clear: ‘the case for a military revolution remains not proven at best and dubious at worst.’

David Parrott challenges Roberts' view of the Thirty Years' War by showing that military growth before 1660 led to private contracting rather than to centralized states. Armies were raised and funded by private entrepreneurs like Wallenstein, who offered to self-finance troops. The logic was brutal: fifty thousand men were needed to garrison territory and extract 'contributions' to pay for them. Smaller armies couldn't be self-financing. Parrott argues that centralization came after 1660 as a reaction to these systems' excesses, not as a result of them. Military expansion weakened states, which only later built stronger institutions in response.

So where does that leave us? I think it leaves us with something more interesting than either a confirmed revolution or a debunked myth.

None of the changes are contested — army sizes grew, the trace italienne reshaped European strategy, pike-and-shot spread across the continent, and gunpowder eventually produced a fundamentally different battlefield. What’s contested is the speed, the universality, and, above all, the causal mechanism.

Change varied across regions. Eastern European cavalry warfare wasn't a backward version of Western practice but a valid alternative suited to different terrain and tactics. Even during revolutionary times, traditional methods could outperform new ones when appropriate.

J.R. Hale's framing of 'Military Reformation' rather than a revolution may be the most honest: a gradual accumulation of experience, with no single turning point, stretching back into the fifteenth century and forward into the eighteenth. The battles were real. The sieges were real. The fiscal pressure was real. But they unfolded the way most historical change does: messily, incompletely, always in response to what someone on the other side was doing. The arms race was self-perpetuating precisely because no single power could dominate all the others for long.

Let me bring us back to Novara.

The Swiss won that day. They would win a few more times after that. But within two years, at Marignano, Francis I would show what a commander who understood the new combined-arms reality could do. Artillery under Galiot de Genouillac. Gendarme cavalry repeatedly charging the Swiss flanks. A prepared defensive position in good terrain. The Swiss reached the French lines. They could not break them. They could not take the guns. When Venetian reinforcements arrived the following morning, it was over.

No single factor defeated the Swiss. It was the combination — the interaction of weapons, tactics, terrain, and the command's intelligence to orchestrate them. That's the story of this entire period. Not a revolution imposed by a single technology, nor a simple evolution that left everything essentially the same. Something more like a continuous and deadly conversation between weapon and counter-weapon, formation and counter-formation, wall and gun. The states that survived were those that could keep paying for the conversation, keep adapting, and keep incorporating the next lesson while the last was still being absorbed.

Which is, when you think about it, what war has always been about.

In our next episode, we’ll explore the origins of the Dutch Reformation.

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