Download PDF | (History of Warfare 72) Brian J. Davies - Warfare in Eastern Europe, 1500-1800-Brill Academic Pub (2012).
371 Pages
INTRODUCTION, Brian Davies
Scholars in Central and Eastern Europe have produced a rich literature on the military history of Eastern Europe—Polish and German historians have been especially prolifi c–but until recently little of it was made available in English. Anglophone readers are therefore less familiar with the ways in which resource mobilization for war, the conduct of war, and the impact of war on the state and society diff ered in Eastern from Western Europe. Th is has perpetuated some misunderstandings about the geopolitical centrality of Western European military confl icts in the early modern period and the extent to which Western European techniques associated with “Military Revolution” had already become essential prescriptions for the military success of states.
We hope that the essays in this volume will help address these misconceptions. Th ese essays reveal the scale of destructiveness of Eastern European wars over the sixteenth-eighteenth centuries and the enormous consequences these wars had for the balance of power elsewhere, in the West and in Asia; they also provide knowledge useful for critically unpacking two of the prevailing paradigms in early modern military history, the concepts of Military Revolution and Fiscal-Military State, testing how far either is applicable to early modern Eastern European experience. In comparing Western and Eastern European military practice in the 16th–18th centuries it is fi rst important to recognize that there could have been no single, monolithic Eastern European “mode of warfare” any more than there was a comprehensive, uniform Western mode. Diff erences in terrain, length of campaign season, population densities, and above all in the constellations of warring powers make it necessary to speak here of at least two great military theaters in Eastern Europe in the early modern period, each with its own distinctive repertory of military practices.
Th ey were not the only identifi able theaters in Eastern Europe, but they were the two most signifi cant, and they present a striking contrast in terms of military praxis. Th e Baltic theater of war extended across northern Eastern Europe from the Oresund into Ingria and Karelia, and from Scania and Karelia as far south as central Poland and the Smolensk road to Moscow. Population density and urban commercial development were greater here than in the Pontic theater of war to the south, making it easier for armies to forage and extort “contributions.” Th e larger port cities of the old Hanse along the southern Baltic coast were especially rich strategic prizes because of the tribute and control of terms of Baltic trade they off ered. But the longer winter season and the heavy rains of autumn discouraged long operations and required that armies be demobilized at winter’s approach or sent into winter quarters.
Th e dense network of rivers and tributary rivers facilitated movement of artillery and provisions by barge, which was cheaper and faster than carriage overland. Because settlement was denser armies could follow shorter march routes between respites. Th ick forest, marshland, and narrow winding roads tended to slow march rates, however, particularly on major expeditions where larger armies were followed by long trains. Long delays along comparatively short march routes occurred when baggage wagons caused bottlenecks or slid off -road. Th e abilities to lay down corduroy roads and erect pontoon bridges were quicker to become necessary skills in the Baltic theater. Th ere were some large-scale and decisive fi eld battles in the wars of the Baltic theater (Orsza, Klushino, Dirschau, Warsaw, Kliszów, etc.), but they do not provide a clear test of the superiority of Mauritsian line tactics—this is true even of many of Gustav II Adolf ’s battles—in part because terrain was oft en too broken to facilitate line tactics, troops lacked the drill to master more than the most elementary fi ring systems, and because commanders still preferred to trust to cavalry action to decide the fi nal outcome.
At Kirchholm and at Klushino Polish husarz cavalry routed much larger forces of Swedish and Scots musketeers and pikemen.1 Except in Swedish and mercenary forces pikes were not much used—janissary, haiduk, and strelets infantry largely dispensed with them. To substitute for pike protection musketeers were oft en deployed behind fi eld fortifi cations or in a wagenburg. Sieges were more common than fi eld battles and until the beginning of the eighteenth century the capture of enemy strongholds was considered a more important campaign objective than attriting or destroying enemy fi eld armies. Until the mid-17th century, when some Baltic coast cities were refortifi ed with trace italienne works, most fortresses were old curtain-wall stone fortresses and not very large (with the exceptions of Ivangorod and Smolensk), or, as in Muscovy and Lithuania, palisade or ostrog-style wooden fortresses with high towers. One would suppose both types to be more vulnerable to bombardment than the trace italienne, except that the heavy rains and early freezing of the ground made it diffi cult to dig trenches to bring siege guns close enough to the wall. Guns were more oft en moved and positioned behind shift ing gabion lines than through trench approaches and behind fortifi ed redoubts.2 Rain and frost also complicated mining. Gunnery skills before the mid-seventeenth century appear to have been low; there may have been gunners of good eye who knew from experience or intuition how to point a piece, but there was little evidence that knowledge of the principles of scientifi c gunnery had spread far into Eastern Europe. Although the Muscovites followed the Ottoman practice of acquiring great numbers of heavy bombard-style guns (Russ. stenobitnye pushki, Turk. balyemez), these do not seem to have guaranteed success in besieging enemy castles and fortresses, so that the Muscovites were usually forced to fall back on lobbing incendiary shot over the fortress walls to start fi res within and then taking the walls by storm assault. Even into the early eighteenth century cavalry continued to play a major operational role, not just in foraging and reconnaissance to support siege operations but especially in raiding to demoralize enemy troops and prevent enemy forces from joining together. Th e cavalry raids led fi rst by Shah Ali and then by P. I. Shuiskii and A. M. Kurbskii paralyzed the Livonian Order and obtained the surrender of Dorpat and other towns without resistance (1558–1559); one should note that much of this cavalry comprised Tatar horse archers fi ghting without fi rearms. Darius Kupisz writes below of the great cavalry raid undertaken across northern Muscovy in 1581 by Krzysztof Radziwiłł; it probably decided the outcome of that year’s campaign, even though Radziwiłł led just 6,000 horse. On the other hand, the Muscovite siege of Smolensk (1632–1634) failed above all because prior despoliation by the Lithuanians and bad weather made it impossible for the Muscovites to fi nd enough fodder to use their cavalry to break out of the Polish encirclement.3 Naval operations on the Baltic continued to play an important role though the entire period, not only to establish claim to sea lanes but especially to break blockades of the great port cities of the Baltic coast (Gdansk, Riga, etc.) Initially navies were small, half-corsair in character, and limited to a few powers– in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, to the Danes and Swedes, followed far behind by the Poles. Lübeck’s naval power was already in decline by the 1570s, while the Dutch long preferred to subsidize the Danish fl eet to protect their merchantmen in the eastern Baltic.4 By the late seventeenth- early eighteenth century the Dutch, English and the Russians joined the ranks of the maritime powers with war fl eets operating in the eastern Baltic. Interest in hiring Western military specialists with new skills was shown early on. In the late fi ft eenth through fi rst half of the sixteenth centuries those most in demand in Eastern European courts were Italian masters who could impart new techniques of gun casting, fortress architecture, and siege-work excavation. Ivan the Terrible and King Stefan Bathory competed with each other to hire Italian masters in the 1560s–1570s. By the late 16th-early 17th centuries recruiting expanded and redirected to target German, Dutch, French, English, and Scots offi cers who could bring into service their own small trained bands of mercenary soldiers, especially infantry. Th ese mercenary forces were not large enough to have much impact on the course of campaigns, even if their technical skills and tactics were observed with interest. In the 1630s, however, Muscovy and Poland-Lithuania decided to compete in building semi-standing “foreign formations” (inozemskii stroi, cudzoziemski autorament) signifi cantly supplementing their traditional national formations. Muscovite reliance on foreign formation troops further expanded during the Th irteen Years’ War (1654–1667), although political constraints prevented Poland-Lithuania from keeping pace with this. By the 1670s we fi nd signs that the techniques Michael Roberts associated with Military Revolution had actually begun to transform infantry and artillery tactics in the Muscovite army, at least in the two foreign formation regiments that were fully standing.5 Another wave of Russian commitment to hiring foreign specialists to “modernize” the army began in the 1690s and early years of the Great Northern War and had its most transforming eff ect on military engineering and the artillery service. Th e Danubian-Pontic theater of war comprised the lands along the Danube from Croatia and Bosnia through Transylvania and the lands along the northern coast of the Black Sea from Wallachia and Moldavia through Ukraine, the Bucak Horde and Crimean Khanate, the Zaporozhian and Don Cossack Hosts, southern Russia, and the North Caucasus just below the Kuban River. Tatar raiding and periodic Tatar invasions could extend this theater as far north as Cracow, Lublin, and Moscow. Th e Danubian-Pontic theater was the military frontier between the Ottoman Empire and the Christian powers of Central and Eastern Europe. One of the most striking features of military experience in the Danubian-Pontic theater was the major strategic role played by fortifi ed defense lines (the Croatian-Hungarian grenze of the Habsburgs, the Ottoman defense line in Hungary, and Muscovy’s Abatis Line, Belgorod Line, and Iziuma Line). Manpower mobilization, provisioning, and administrative techniques on these defense lines were generally similar (there were even close resemblances between Ottoman and Muscovite wooden fortifi cation construction techniques). Th ese defense lines linked up small semi-standing or standing garrison forces of military colonists performing constant local border defense duty. Larger operations on or beyond the defense line (attacks, interception of larger attacking forces) were undertaken by fi eld armies brought down to the line for that purpose. Th ere were, however, some signifi cant diff erences in how defense lines related to shift s in frontier strategy over the longer term. Th e frontier marked by the Habsburg and Ottoman defense lines was much more static over time—even the Long War of 1591–1606 ended with no major change to the frontier, despite the frequent loss and recapture of border castles on both sides. Th is remained the case until the Holy League War of 1683–1699. By contrast, the Muscovite defense lines took the form of uninterrupted limes of wood and earth wall linking garrisons; ran through much less densely populated territory, initially forest-steppe and later mostly steppe, which, unlike the Danube basin, lacked any natural frontier boundary; and defended primarily against chronic Crimean Tatar slave-raiding and occasional Tatar invasions aiming at terrorizing and extorting tribute rather than conquering and holding territory. Th is presented greater opportunity for Muscovy– with huge investment in military colonization and fortifi cation construction–to gradually erect new defense lines farther south and extend its frontier closer to the Black Sea. Th ese new lines also extended the Muscovite/Russian frontier farther west into Ukraine and farther east to the Volga and the Kama. Along that part of the Ottoman/ Christian European frontier lacking a defense line system—PolandLithuania’s Ukrainian frontier—defense was entrusted to just a few small separated border fortresses and the steppes between them policed by the small royal Quarter Army (4,000 men or fewer) and the registered cossacks. Th is proved to be a major blunder when the PolishLithuanian government’s refusal to expand the cossack register became a factor provoking cossack rebellion in 1648, rebel cossack alliance with the Crimean Khanate (1648–1654), and the placing of the new Ukrainian Hetmanate under Muscovite protection (from 1654); it also led to the loss of Ukrainian Podolia to the Ottomans (1676), to the depopulation of the western Ukrainian lands formally remaining under Polish-Lithuanian rule, and to Poland-Lithuania’s loss of great power status.6 Th e adoption of armaments, military formations, and tactics was heavily infl uenced by the military challenge presented by the Ottoman Empire. One is almost tempted to posit an Ottoman Military Revolution transforming Eastern European warfare in the sixteenth century. Muscovy followed the Ottoman example by continuing to invest through the rest of the sixteenth century in very large siege guns. Th e janissary infantry corps served as a model for other Eastern European gunpowder infantries (Hungarian and Polish haiduks, Muscovite strel’tsy) before the seventeenth-century Western formation troops; Ottoman and Eastern European infantries relied on wagenburg/tabor defenses rather than pikes for protection. Serbian racowie lancers, designed to counter Ottoman armored sipahi and deli cavalry, evolved into Polish husarz lancers and Muscovite kopeishchik lancers. Muscovy and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth found it tactically advantageous into the early eighteenth century to continue using Tatar mounted archers as auxiliaries. Bastioned artillery fortresses came into use on the Muscovite defense lines beginning in the 1630s–1650s, but they were of earthen rather than stone construction and designed by Dutch engineers rather than Italians. During the Th irteen Years’ War Muscovy came to rely not just heavily but preponderantly upon Western-style inozemskii stroi troops (soldat infantry, reitar cavalry, dragoons) offi cered by Western Europeans and Russians. But until the 1676–1681 Russo-Turkish War the advantage the Western formation troops provided was less tactical than numerical: because they were levied from the peasantry greater numbers of them could be raised to replace the heavy losses taken by the army. Political constraints prevented the Polish crown from undertaking levies on this scale, with the result that the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was less able to rebuild its regiments and lost the war through attrition. Under Peter the Great a large standing army of fusilier infantry and dragoon cavalry was formed by making the inozemskii stroi levies of Tsar Aleksei’s time a regular annual occurrence and keeping recruits in service, initially for life. We tend to think of the Habsburg-Ottoman wars in Hungary and Serbia as predominantly wars of sieges, with warfare farther east on the less populated plains and steppes of Ukraine and southern Russia characterized more by open battle and cavalry operations. Actually, wherever mastery of territory was contested (Moldavia, Ukraine) sieges were necessary. Th e challenge was to move large forces of infantry and artillery across considerable distances of open steppe to undertake sieges. Th e most common solution to this, employed down into the early eighteenth century, was to move troops in large wagenburg convoys screened by cavalry. Th ere were instances of decisive cavalry battles or cavalry victories over infantry (Konotop, 1659; Sobieski’s corps volantes attacks on Tatar columns in the 1670s), but it remained the case that even the best European cavalry (Polish husarz lancers, for example) could not provide a clear and constant tactical advantage over Tatar mounted archers when the latter were numerically preponderant. Such advantage could only be provided by massive infantry and artillery fi repower, and that too required the use of the wagenburg as convoy and fi ghting position.7 Naval power played some role in confl icts in the Black Sea. Before 1700 it was asymmetric naval warfare in which cossack chaika longboats attacked Ottoman galleys and merchant ships or made desant raids on Ottoman and Crimean coastal towns. From 1700 it involved Ottoman and Russian navies, both by then largely westernized, using frigates as well as galleys, with naval operations extending out from the Black Sea and into the Dardanelles and Aegean and the Russian fl eet making eff ective use of fi re-ships and line-ahead tactics (Chios, Chesme, 1770).8 Th e notion that the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries saw some kind of Military Revolution in Western Europe subsequently spreading into Eastern Europe and European-Asian military theaters remains the dominant paradigm in early modern European military history. Its continuing popularity derives from the fact that it makes a bold, simple, and sweeping assertion about the impact of technological innovation on tactics, force structure, state building, estate/class relations, and the balance of power between Europe and Asia. But there are competing schools of interpretation as to what particular innovations drove the Military Revolution, when and where they originated, and how their eff ects proved “revolutionary.”9 Th e original model, presented by Michael Roberts in a 1955 lecture,10 argued that the Military Revolution was inspired by the works of Maurice of Nassau and other Dutch and German military thinkers of the later sixteenth century who prescribed standardizing platooncompany-regiment unit organization for the infantry and increasing the number of under-offi cers so the rank-and-fi le could be drilled more intensely and brought to master new fi ring systems and marches into and from line rather than tercio block deployment. Gustav II Adolf then refi ned the new linear infantry tactics, expanded the number of smaller regimental guns, and reassigned the cavalry to delivering shock charge rather than caracole fi repower. He had such success with these tactics in the Th irty Years’ War they gradually became the model for emulation for most Western and Central European armies. Competition to build larger infantry armies drilled by experienced specialists raised the costs of warfare, exposed civilian populations to greater military devastation, and posed growing administrative and fi scal challenges to states. Th e Military Revolution could also be seen as launching or reinforcing a social revolution in Europe because it emphasized the tactical value of the infantry at the expense of the cavalry and thereby expanded the relative weight in the army of socially plebeian elements, and because it increased their cohesion (and thereby perhaps their civic esprit) through drill. A second model of Military Revolution, proposed by Geoff rey Parker,11 sees the Military Revolution as occurring earlier, towards the end of the fi ft eenth century, originating in the northern Italian theater of war, and deriving above all from the innovation of the inclined-wall bastioned artillery fortress (fortifi cation in the style of the trace italienne) that was more resistant to artillery bombardment and which could provide more crossfi re from its multiple angled bastions. Sieges of the new artillery fortresses became much more protracted aff airs and required besieging armies large enough to undertake entrenchment and countervallation fortifi cations while bombarding and storming and guarding their rear from enemy relief forces. Th is dramatically expanded army size and thereby spurred states to collect more revenue for war. Th e Roberts and Parker models of Military Revolution have been subjected to criticism on several points: for downplaying the transformative signifi cance of the expanded roles of infantry and artillery from the fi ft eenth century, before the emergence of the artillery fortress, for example; or for overstating the extent to which the innovations of the artillery fortress or linear infantry tactics provoked dramatic expansion in army size.12 Jeremy Black argues that a dramatic, saltative transformation in the sixteenth-early seventeenth centuries was not apparent, that the technical breakthroughs that Roberts and Parker treated as “revolutionary” were actually foundations for later innovations that began to show genuinely revolutionary consequences only over the eighteenth century.13 Black has also made some compelling arguments about lack of clarity in the Roberts and Parker models as to what constituted “revolution” and just how technological change worked as cause of larger eff ects. In retrospect one can see easily enough that the trace italienne and linear infantry tactics at least changed the conduct of warfare in the sense that they challenged prevailing tactical practices, required some responding changes, and found quick imitation in other parts of Europe. In that sense it may be wiser to speak of Military Adaptation. Th e term Military Revolution, however, implies that possession of these new techniques gave a nation clear and lasting military preponderance. Th e problem for the historian is how that preponderance can be demonstrated in direct cause-and-eff ect terms. Generalizations about the tactical superiority of one formation over another (cuirassier pistoleers against lancers, for example) are hard to sustain given the number of exceptional instances to the contrary; and, as operational military historians recognize, it is not a straightforward matter to identify the key factor producing victory in a particular battle, much less victory in a campaign or war.14 In other words, if one is to argue that the Military Revolution was “revolutionary” in shift ing the balance of power towards those nations possessing MR techniques, it is not enough to assume this by observing the eff ect, the ultimate shift in the balance of power; one must show its cause by documenting the accumulation of victories in battle, campaign, and war that were clearly attributable to MR practice. Th is is not an easy task.
Jeremy Black suggests that if we want to continue looking for a revolutionary transformation by MR in terms of a dramatic and lasting shift in the balance of power, it should be the shift in the balance of power between Europe and Asia. Such a shift can be discerned in the second half of the eighteenth century in the ability of small European armies and fl eets to achieve regularly overwhelming victories over much larger Asian forces, in the opening of Asian powers to European colonial domination, and in the scramble by Asian powers to adapt by joining the Military Revolution and developing their own nizami-jedid forces. Eastern European warfare becomes an important test of this revised model of Military Revolution, since it is in Eastern Europe that the contest between European powers and the Ottoman Empire was centered; and here 18th-century Russian adaptation to European Military Revolution could be suggested as the most transformative development. Th e lopsided outcomes of such land battles as Fokshany, Larga and Kagul and naval engagements as Chesme and Beirut could be cited in support of this. Black believes that this mid-eighteenth century Military Revolution was the culmination of many changes in military technology, organization, and tactical and strategic practice over a long period, with the fi nal European “edge” attributable to more recent developments like the replacement of the pike with the ring bayonet, the fl intlock musket, the construction of forward magazines, etc.; he also sees the real increase in army size occurring in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Bruce Menning emphasizes the development by such Russian commanders as P. A. Rumiantsev and A. V. Suvorov of “new tactical formations which capitalized on fl exibility and discipline both in the approach march and the assault.”15 I see this Russian-led culmination of European Military Revolution as resulting from a synthesis of lessons from the Baltic, Central European, and Pontic-Danubian theaters over the course of the eighteenth century, from Peter I’s Great Northern War through the Seven Years’ War and the 1768–1774 Russo-Turkish War. But I also believe this Military Revolution must be broadly conceived to allow for the role of new practices that were not purely military, such as frontier colonization policies and changes in the structure and function of provincial government.16 Military Revolution has also been seen as an agency of political and social change. Th ere seems to be association between Military Revolution and political and social change, but identifying which is cause and which is eff ect is diffi cult. Th e Roberts and Parker models argue that Military Revolution expanded the scale and costs of warfare and therefore required monarchs to turn to the construction of absolutisms or military-fi scal states able to mobilize greater resources for war. However, Black argues that those states best positioned to pursue Military Revolution and mobilize more manpower and revenue for war were those which had already achieved integration, stabilization, and centralization on the basis of political-social arrangements that were not necessarily directly connected with war policy and did not necessarily require the coercive power of nationwide royal monopoly of military force (achieved by off ering compromises to end religious confl ict, for example, or by co-opting aristocratic and bourgeois elites with new offi ces and mercantile ventures). Th e ability to join in the Military Revolution was greatly limited where these political-social arrangements had not already been established. Eastern European experience provides a striking illustration of this. Th e Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth had the initial strategic advantages of vast territory, large population, integration into the capitalist world-system, and large nobility with a proud martial tradition. Th e Commonwealth was involved in intense military competition with Sweden, Muscovy, and the Ottoman Empire up to the early eighteenth century; its rulers were open to the borrowing of military techniques from Western Europe, even to the point of trying to build a large foreign formation army in the 1630s. Yet the Polish-Lithuanian nobility ultimately refused to permit the construction of a royal absolutism or even a parliamentsanctioned fi scal-military state. Even the association between political culture and the ability to sustain successful participation in Military Revolution is diffi cult to disentangle. Th e concept of absolutism has lost much of its analytic power and even its descriptive power; disagreement continues over whether the social foundation of absolutism was a royal collaboration with the nobility, with the bourgeoisie, or both kept in equilibrium; meanwhile Nicholas Henshall has been successful in arguing “absolutism” should be understood as a political aspiration by certain monarchs and collaborating elites, not a condition ever actually achieved. Historians have therefore turned to the term “fi scal-military state” to describe those states which reached a power threshold enabling them to mobilize manpower and revenue for war on a much larger scale and sustained basis. Th e advantage of “fi scal-military state” is its own vagueness: it is a category that admits states of very diff erent political constitutions (the “absolutizing” French monarchy, the Dutch Republic, the English parliamentary monarchy). For this reason much of the work on the history of the fi scal-military state17 has been preoccupied with inventorying the range of political systems that aspired to or attained the power threshold of the fi scal-military state. But the openness of the concept is at the same its disadvantage; it cannot go very far in identifying common practices, particularly fi scal practices. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, for example, one of the most effi - cient fi scal-military states in Western Europe was England, a regime resting upon a condominium of royal and parliamentary power and relying on both taxes and fi nance to mobilize resources for war. In Eastern Europe at this time the two regimes most successful in mobilizing resources for war were Russia and the Ottoman Empire. Th e former pretended to patrimonial autocracy, rested upon the exchange of state service and royal bounty, and drew most of the resources for war from royal domain regalia rather than from taxes or fi nance (taxation was very ineff ective, and fi nance nearly non-existent). Th e Ottoman Empire was beginning the transition from patrimonial autocracy to a more decentralized multi-polar political system that had started to raise more military resources through private household patronage and tax-farming fi nance. Politically these three regimes had little in common, but by the test of resource mobilization power they have all been considered fi scal-military states. Perhaps discourse on the fi scalmilitary state has strayed too far from the text that originally inspired it: Joseph Schumpeter’s “Th e Crisis of the Tax State” (1918), which viewed the fi scal state or tax state as a stage in the fi scal development of European states (from tribute state through the medieval domain state to the modern tax state. 18 Th e contributors to this volume are specialists in the history of most of the greater powers of Eastern Europe (save Sweden) and treat a wide range of themes in early modern military history. Th ey write here not only for fellow specialists but especially for non-specialist readers interested in learning more about some of the fundamental issues in early modern Eastern European military and political history. Janet Martin provides a useful introduction to one of the most fundamental institutions in 16th–17th century Muscovy: the pomest’e system of military service, which was as important for Muscovite army as the Ottoman timar system it resembled. Traditional historiography sees Ivan IV’s 1556 reform standardizing service obligations by pomest’e grant size as enabling the state to mobilize large cavalry forces for his Kazan’, southern frontier, and Livonian wars. Martin, however, sees these service norms as unrealistic almost from the start, just thirty or so years from the introduction of pomest’e-based campaign duty, and she examines the reasons why pomest’e economy was insuffi cient to equip cavalrymen for service without supplemental cash bounty payments from the Treasury. Géza Pálff y examines the frontier fortifi cations, captain-generalcies, and central administration of Hungary’s Ottoman frontier in the sixteenth century, showing how the complicated territorial and estate structure of the Habsburg monarchy did not prevent it from centralizing and systematizing frontier military administration. Palff y argues that some of the innovations attending the development of the frontier defense system—reliance on standing troops, arsenal development, centralized administration from the Aulic War Council– could be seen as Habsburg refi nements of the European Military Revolution. Dariusz Kupisz corrects the misperception that the political system of Poland-Lithuania always prevented the monarchy from adapting successfully to Military Revolution. Th ere were at least periods— Bathory’s reign in particular—when the nature of the military emergency encouraged estates and monarchy to collaborate in expanding and modernizing the armed forces. In the case of Bathory’s reign this paid off in spectacular strategic gains, in part because of the King’s talent for shrewd campaign planning. Kupisz’s chapter is also invaluable in presenting a crucial part of the Livonian War from the PolishLithuanian perspective (most work on this subject is given from the Russian perspective). Brian Davies argues that a diff erence between Western and Eastern European infantry tactics was the long-standing preference in the east, particularly in the Danubian-Pontic theater, for placing infantry fi repower behind a fortifi ed wagon-lager and moving troops within vast wagenburg formations. He surveys the spread of these tactics across Eastern Europe and tries to show how they were ultimately rendered obsolete and superseded in the eighteenth century. Oleg Nozdrin works on the subject of Western European mercenaries in Eastern European service. Some recent work has given greater attention to this subject because of its obvious connections with the question of the dissemination of new technical and tactical skills, and there has been some publication on English projects to intervene in the Troubles and possibly stake out a sphere of infl uence in the White Sea North. But Nozdrin’s chapter is unusual in its use of very disparate archival and published materials from across Europe to reconstruct the career of a particularly colorful and important mercenary adventurer and to examine the nature of his interests in Muscovy. His essay reminds us that we need to look at the motives of mercenary entrepreneurs as well as foreign governments to explain the circumstances of export of mercenary manpower. Carol Belkin Stevens focuses on logistics, especially the food provisioning of the 16th–17th century Muscovite army, which had been a neglected topic in secondary literature until her masterful 1995 monograph Soldiers on the Steppe: Army Reform and Social Change in Early Modern Russia, the result of extensive examination of the records of the Military Chancellery and other chancelleries. As a domain state legitimated as patrimonial autocracy by the service/bounty exchange, the Muscovite state in the sixteenth century relied primarily upon selfprovisioning through the pomest’e system to supply its army (see Martin, above). Stevens shows how this changed over the next century, the demand for more manpower for more protracted campaigning in more “modern” western European-style “foreign formations” requiring the expansion of sutlering and especially the strengthening of the state’s power to tax in cash and grain so as to provision in rations and annual bounty pay. Her work is indispensible to any serious discussion of whether Russia was already a fi scal-military state before the eighteenth century. Victor Ostapchuk reminds us that the Crimean Khanate was one of the most formidable military powers in Europe, capable of overwhelming frontier defense systems and moving large armies deep into enemy territory, even as far north as Cracow and Moscow. Small-scale raiding for captives led by mirza nobles might be relatively improvised operations, but the large-scale sefer invasions led by the khan or his sons were carefully planned and directed operations. As most of the archives of the Khanate have perished, Ostapchuk turns to a remarkable 16thcentury Ottoman chronicle, Th e History of Khan Sahib Girey, to reconstruct how invasion campaigns were organized and conducted in the 1530s–1540s. Ostapchuk’s analysis of this source provides invaluable information about Crimean Tatar military practice and also addresses how Crimean Tatar ideology and religion shaped attitudes towards the purposes of war and slaving. Brian Boeck critically unpacks one of the most misunderstood sources on Don Cossack military operations, Th e Poetical Tale of the Siege of Azov, a remarkably vivid and detailed account of how a force of a few thousand Don Cossacks holding the captured Ottoman Black Sea fortress of Azov withstood siege by a tenfold-larger Ottoman army for over three months in 1641. Boeck presents his own translation of the entire text of the Poetical Tale and allows us to experience the political/ religious rhetoric celebrating the Cossacks’ feat for the tale’s Muscovite readers. He shows that the Poetical Tale is not entirely a fi rst-hand eyewitness account written by or orally related by survivors of the siege, but a composite work, a reworking and embellishment upon some cossack reports, written sometime later by someone in Moscow apparently interested in making greater propaganda signifi cance of the cossack stand than the Moscow government was willing to do (Tsar Mikhail having ordered the evacuation of Azov rather than reinforcing it and risking war with the Porte). Erik Lund addresses the association between military and cultural change in the Habsburg Monarchy. Whether one calls it a Scientifi c Revolution or views it as the expansion and deepening of technicalism (see Marshall Hodgkins), Lund examines the accumulation of practical-technical experience by generals and higher offi cers in the Habsburg army in the “generation of 1683” (from the mobilization to relieve the siege of Vienna through the long reconquest of Hungary). His chapter examines the origins, education, careers, and campaign experience of the generals on the Generallisten and reaches some surprising conclusions about the relative representation of certain nationalities and especially about the correlation between technical competence and promotion. Promotion favored offi cers with engineering and artillery experience; engineering skills were not a marker of “bourgeois” class origin; and despite the absence of formal training in military academies, scientifi c and technical learning was available to and appealing to offi cers as noble courtiers. One of the most valuable and fascinating features of this chapter is the attention it gives to showing how much generalship routinely required technical knowledge and even powers of theoretical abstraction. Peter Brown examines another comparatively neglected topic in Russian military history: the range of command-control practices in the seventeenth-century Muscovite army, especially regarding the movement of troops and battle order and tactics. A summary of the major wars and campaigns of the 17th century allows him to identify a succession of diff erent “leadership styles” while also fi nding a general continuity of preference for centralizing decision-making down to the 1670s. Th is preference derived especially from Muscovite political culture and from low literacy outside the central chancellery apparatus, discouraging offi cer skill acquisition (contrast with Lund’s characterization of the aristocratic commanders of the Habsburg army)–not only from inadequate communications and problems of force projection over distance or inexperience with the new line tactics and more complicated fi ring systems. Virginia Aksan, author of a comprehensive new history of the Ottoman Empire’s wars in the 18th and 19th centuries, here examines what Ottoman performance in war over the 18th century tells us about Ottoman capacities to mobilize and tax, plan, modernize military formations, and adjust strategic goals in Europe to the multinational character of the empire and the coexistence of other military fronts in Asia. Most non-specialists continue to adhere to the old interpretation of a sharp and steady decline in Ottoman power aft er the late sixteenthcentury, connected with a cascade of institutional breakdowns originating in the breakdown of the timar system. Aksan adheres to a newer interpretation, now predominant among younger Ottomanists, which emphasizes the reconfi guration rather than collapse of the political system aft er the 1690s and shows how military resource mobilization came to be conducted upon diff erent principles in the eighteenth century.
Link
Press Here
0 التعليقات :
إرسال تعليق