Military technology and organization

Though the history of Hungary is not one of the rise of a nation-state, it does provide an excellent example of Machiavelli’s assertion of the key role of war and its financing in gaining and maintaining power. By the time of the Battle of Mohacs, changes in military technology and in the way that troops were recruited and provisioned had

Increased the cost of warfare dramatically. The Ottoman Empire was large and unified enough to absorb these costs; Hungary was not.

The deadliest and also most prestigious type of fighter in the fifteenth century was the cavalryman, wearing full plate armor and carrying a lance and sword; he rode a large warhorse which also wore plate armor. Such men-at-arms were almost always members of the nobility, and their primary function in battle was as frontline troops. They charged in formation at a steady canter with lances drawn against the enemy’s front line, hoping to shock it into disarray, and then discarded their lances and fought with swords or maces in individual combat.

Heavy cavalry were regarded as the most important arm of the military in the fifteenth century, but their invulnerability was increasingly challenged. During the latter stages of the Hundred Years War, which ended in 1453, English footsoldiers armed with longbows were very effective against heavily armored French knights, and in other fifteenth-century wars soldiers used steel crossbows drawn by a windlass. Pikes were even deadlier than bows; footsoldiers armed with ten - to fifteen-foot-long pikes, standing very close to one another with their pikes all facing outward - an arrangement termed the Swiss phalanx - were able to defend against a cavalry charge, as long as they held their position. Horses would not charge into a wall of pikes no matter how hard they were spurred, and with the cavalry line disrupted horses and their riders could be wounded or killed.

Gradually the pikemen were reinforced by footsoldiers carrying firearms. The first reasonably portable firearm was the harquebus (or arquebus), a short metal tube attached to a wooden handle, loaded down the muzzle with powder and a round bullet. (The woodcut that opens this chapter shows a soldier firing a harquebus.) The powder was initially lit by a slow-burning wick called a match-cord through a touchhole in the barrel - a firing mechanism termed a matchlock. Around 1500, wheel-lock firing mechanisms, in which iron pyrite creates sparks by being scraped along a metal wheel, were developed, producing the first self-igniting firearm. The wheel-lock was safer to the gunner than the matchlock as it did not require an open flame, but the harquebus was heavy and took so long to reload that two pikemen stood on either side of a har-quebusier to defend him against a cavalry charge.

The musket, developed in the 1520s, was much lighter and easier to reload than the harquebus. Muskets also originally used matchlocks or wheel-locks to fire, but in the early seventeenth century a French courtier invented the flintlock firing mechanism, in which flint strikes a piece of steel to make sparks, which ignite powder in an attached flash-pan and this in turn (if things work correctly) ignites the main charge in the barrel. Flintlock weapons quickly replaced other types, and remained the most common portable firearm in Europe and European colonies until the middle of the nineteenth century. (They also provided several common English expressions, including “flash in the pan” for something that makes a lot of noise but has no lasting effect.) Musket balls could easily pierce armor, and though plate armor got thicker, this thickness resulted in

Increased weight, making horses so slow they were even more vulnerable; a nobleman had to figure he would lose his horse every time he went into battle. Military commanders generally arranged their troops with one pikeman to every two musketeers, though the later invention and adoption of the bayonet - a dagger attached to the end of the gun - made the same soldier both musketeer and pikeman. Infantry - that is, troops on foot - became the heart of early modern armies.