The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. Paul Kennedy
Castile, Aragon, Burgundy, and Austria, the later acquisitions by his house of the crowns of Bohemia, Hungary, Portugal, and, for a short time, even of England, and the coincidence of these dynastic events with the Spanish conquest and exploitation of the New World – these provided the house of Habsburg with a wealth of resources that no other European power could match.17
Given the many gaps and inaccuracies in available statistics, one should not place too much reliance upon the population figures of this time; but it would be fair to assume that about one-quarter of the peoples of early-modern Europe were living in Habsburg-ruled territory. However, such crude totals* were less important than the wealth of the regions in question, and here the dynastic inheritance seemed to have been blessed with riches.
There were five chief sources of Habsburg finance, and several smaller ones. By far the most important was the Spanish inheritance of Castile, since it was directly ruled and regular taxes of various sorts (the sales tax, the ‘crusade’ tax on religious property) had been conceded to the crown by the Cortes and the church. In addition, there were the two richest trading areas of Europe – the Italian states and the Low Countries – which could provide comparatively large funds from their mercantile wealth and mobile capital. The fourth source, increasingly important as time went on, was the revenue from the American empire. The ‘royal fifth’ of the silver and gold mined there, together with the sales tax, custom duties, and church levies in the New World, provided a vast bonus to the kings of Spain, not only directly but also indirectly, for the American treasures which went into private hands, whether Spanish or Flemish or Italian, helped those individuals and concerns to pay the increasing state taxes levied upon them, and in times of emergency, the monarch could always borrow heavily from the bankers in the expectation of paying off his debts when the silver fleet arrived. The fact that the Habsburg territories contained the leading financial and mercantile houses – those of southern Germany, of certain of the Italian cities, and of Antwerp – must be counted as an additional advantage, and as the fifth major source of income.18 It was certainly more readily accessible than, say, revenues from Germany, where the princes and free cities represented in the Reichstag voted money to the emperor only if the Turks were at the door.19
In the postfeudal age, when knights were no longer expected to perform individual military service (at least in most countries) nor coastal towns to provide a ship, the availability of ready cash and the possession of good credit were absolutely essential to any state engaged in war. Only by direct payment (or promise of payment) could the necessary ships and naval stores and armaments and foodstuffs be mobilized within the market economy to furnish a fleet ready for combat; only by the supply of provisions and wages on a reasonably frequent basis could one’s own troops be steered away from mutiny and their energies directed toward the foe. Moreover, although this is commonly regarded as the age when the ‘nation-state’ came into its own in western Europe, all governments relied heavily upon foreign mercenaries to augment their armies. Here the Habsburgs were again blessed, in that they could easily recruit in Italy and the Low Countries as well as in Spain and Germany; the famous Army of Flanders, for example, was composed of six main nationalities, reasonably loyal to the Catholic cause but still requiring regular pay. In naval terms, the Habsburg inheritance could produce an imposing conglomeration of fighting vessels: in Philip II’s later years, for example, Mediterranean galleys, great carracks from Genoa and Naples, and the extensive Portuguese fleet could reinforce the armadas of Castile and Aragon.
But perhaps the greatest military advantage possessed by the Habsburgs during these 140 years was the Spanish-trained infantry. The social structure and the climate of ideas made Castile an ideal recruiting ground; there, notes Lynch, ‘soldiering had become a fashionable and profitable occupation not only for the gentry but for the whole population’.20 In addition, Gonzalo de Córdoba, the ‘Great Captain’, had introduced changes in the organization of infantry early in the sixteenth century, and from then until the middle of the Thirty Years War the Spanish tercio was the most effective unit on the battlefields of Europe. With these integrated regiments of up to 3,000 pikemen, swordsmen, and arquebusiers, trained to give mutual support, the Spanish army swept aside innumerable foes and greatly reduced the reputation – and effectiveness – of French cavalry and Swiss pike phalanxes. As late as the battle of Nördlingen (1634), the Cardenal-Infante’s infantry resisted fifteen charges by the formidable Swedish army and then, like Wellington’s troops at Waterloo, grimly moved forward to crush their enemy. At Rocroi (1643), although surrounded by the French, the Spaniards fought to the death. Here, indeed, was one of the strongest pillars in the Habsburg edifice; and it is significant that Spanish power visibly cracked only in the mid-seventeenth century, when its army consisted chiefly of German, Italian, and Irish mercenaries with far fewer warriors from Castile.
Yet, for all these advantages, the Spanish-Austrian dynastic alliance could never prevail. Enormous though its financial and military resources appeared to contemporaries, there was never sufficient to meet requirements. This critical deficiency was itself due to three factors which interacted with each other over the entire period – and which, by extension, provide major lessons for the study of armed conflict.
The first of these factors, mentioned briefly above, was the ‘military revolution’ of early-modern Europe: that is to say, the massive increase in the scale, costs and organization of war which occurred in the 150 years roughly following the 1520s.21 This change was itself the result of various intertwined elements, tactical, political, and demographic. The blows dealt to the battlefield dominance of cavalry – first by the Swiss pikemen and then by mixed formations of men bearing pikes, swords, crossbows, and aquebuses – meant that the largest and most important part of an army was now its infantry. This conclusion was reinforced by the development of the tracé italien, that sophisticated system of city fortifications and bastions mentioned in the previous chapter. To man such defensive systems, or to besiege them, required a very large number of troops. Of course, in a major campaign a well-organized commander would be successfully employing considerable numbers of cavalry and artillery as well, but those two arms were much less ubiquitous than regiments of foot soldiers. It was not the case, then, that nations scrapped their cavalry forces, but that the infantry proportion in their armies rose markedly; being cheaper to equip and feed, foot soldiers could be recruited in large numbers, especially since Europe’s population was rising. Naturally, all this placed immense organizational strains upon governments, but not so great that they would necessarily overwhelm the bureaucracies of the ‘new monarchies’ of the West – just as the vast increase in the size of the armies would not inevitably make a general’s task impossible, provided that his forces had a good command structure and were well drilled.
The Spanish Empire’s army probably provides the best example of the ‘military revolution’ in action. As its historian notes, ‘there is no evidence that any one state fielded more than 30,000 effectives’ in the Franco-Spanish struggle for Italy before 1529; but:
In 1536–7 the Emperor Charles V mobilized 60,000 men in Lombardy alone for the defence of his recent conquest, Milan, and for the invasion of French Provence. In 1552, assailed on all fronts at once – in Italy, Germany, the Netherlands and Spain, in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean – Charles V raised 109,000 men in Germany and the Netherlands, 24,000 more in Lombardy and yet more in Sicily, Naples and Spain. The emperor must have had at his command, and therefore at his cost, about 150,000 men. The upward trend continued. In 1574 the Spanish Army of Flanders alone numbered 86,000 men, while only half a century later Philip IV could proudly proclaim that the armed forces at his command in 1625 amounted to no less than 300,000 men. In all these armies the real increase in numbers took place among the infantry, especially among the pikemen.