The 'Art of War' in the 17th century ?

The 17th century has been described as the renaissance of the 'Art of War'. Armies became more organized, uniforms were introduced, training became more efficient and new strategies and battlefield tacticts were thought out. I have just begun to dabble in this vast topic and thought I should take the opportunity to draw from the endless knowledge of my fellow forum members.

I´m primarily interested in the battle tactics and the new weapons and 'branches' ( artillery, cavalry etc. ), I´ll save the actual battles for later.

 

Well, pikemen, most famously from Switzerland, dominated the battlefield for much of this period. That changed as guns improved and became more reliable. The pikes tended to be from 18 to 24 feet long, depending on who was using them, and were very effective in defending against cavalry charges and infantry assaults, especially on the open fields of Europe. The length of the pikes obliged the pikemen to march in step, a practice that has, of course, continued to this very day.

 

The success of the Pikemen did mean that sword & buckler troops had a brief return to fame, being the only type of soldier able to efficiently defeat the pike phalanx in hand-to-hand combat. their return was brief, as they were completely at the mercy of everything else on the battlefield, especially cavalry, and were therefore too specialised & a bit useless...

Gunpowder artillery became more effecient, more accurate, more powerful, more portable, and more widespread.

 

Could pikemen be used offensive as well ? Was there any strategy developed for this, or was it more used as a panic solution ?

Any opinions on Gustavus Adolphus and his influence on the reformation of cavalry and artillery btw ?

 

Pikemen were an offensive weapon.

The Swiss drilled & trained so well that their pike units could move with a speed & cohesion that had not been seen since the Romans. Part of their huge success was based on their ability to quickly move around the battlefield and still be in formation when they arrived at their destination.

Even Roman troops had trouble withstanding the charge of a Greek phalanx - so increase the quality of the pikeman's arms & armour, decrease a little the discipline of the opponant...

In case a pike unit got stuck, the centre contained a block of halbardiers, who would run out of the sides of the formation and attack the flanks of the stubborn enemy.

(I read a lot of military history books in my Uni library)

 

Well, I stand corrected.

I thought pikemen were used mostly in defence against attacking infantry and cavalry, or to defend the vulnerable musketeers.

 

One new troop type / tactic was the carbine-armed cavalryman.
They would be employed in a large block, and would ride towards enemy infantry. just before they arrived, the front rank would fire their carbines, wheel round, and ride back down the line to the rear of the block (countermarching, basically).
The second rank would repeat.

If the enemy did not respond, this could go on as long as the ammunition held out or until the enemy formation fell apart.

 

Wouldn't musketeers slaughter pikemen?

 

Actually in many situations the musketeers would be used to guard the flanks of the pikemen, since these were vulnerable at anything but the front and were often saved only by their amazing ability at manoeuver.

What Ricky describes is the cavalry tactic known as the caracole which was dropped shortly after it was introduced because it was vastly inefficient. The gunner would have to stand still in front of the enemy to shoot, then move away and stand still for a long period to reload; meanwhile the entire advantage of cavalry, being speed, was lost to the whole tedious process of line movement for which infantry was much better suited. And this is where Gustavus Adolphus and the Dutch prince Maurice come in, who both recognized the value of massed musketeers alongside pikemen to inflict upon the enemy a continuous drain by keeping the rows moving and the guns firing. Adolphus, IIRC, was one of the first to use cavalry as a flanking force again instead of as a dead-centre unit. In any case his methods of battle decided that musketeers would be useful and would be used, eventually to replace all other infantry entirely.

Actually, since prince Maurice fought a classic battle at Nieuwpoort in 1600 in which he introduced marching in step for musketeers, the age of pikemen was declining after this and the 17th century can't be called "dominated" by pikemen as much as the 15th and 16th centuries. In which a well-organized army of pikemen, if the enemy didn't have longswordsmen, could hold out against just about any foe, since gunpowder weapons of all types weren't exactly useful yet.

There are records of Landsknechten (pikemen, but German) holding out against armies ten times their size by simple flexibility and discipline in the 15th century. Admittedly their enemies in these battles were local rebels, but there were fully armoured knights among them as well.

 

Remember, rate-of-fire for matchlock & wheel-lock muskets was not high. But the time you have got a couple of volleys off, the pikemen are on you.
If your enemy has good cavalry, they can take out the musketeers.

What really killed the pikeman was the bayonet, which meant that every soldier could be a musketeer and a pikeman.

 

I read that the bayonet was 'invented' in the 1670´s. Is that correct ? When did it become common on the battlefield ?

 

I think the bayonet is somewhat older than that.
It is said that the name "bayonet" comes from the town Bayonne in southern France.
It was first described as a military weapon in the 1640's by a man called De Puységur.
By 1670 plug bayonets were widespread in many european armies.
Maréchal Vauban developped the improved socket bayonet in the 1680's.

By the turn of the 17th to the 18th century the bayonet surely was common on most european battlefields.

 

OK, I have just had a few lectures on the art of war of this period, and indeed it seems to have been a great age of change. This particularly applies to the second half of the 17th century, with a particular thrust towards modernization being induced by the French expansionism of Louis XIV.

In the first half of the 17th century most armies still employed pikemen as their centre, but musketeers were gradually becoming more decisive through the volley fire tactics introduced by Maurice of Orange. The role of the pikemen was merely to protect musketeers against enemy infantry and cavalry, but the superiority of pikemen over cavalry was such that heavy cavalry disappeared from the battlefield almost completely for a time; therefore, pikemen no longer really had a purpose. Musketeers were required to defend themselves from this period on, which also allowed for a reintroduction of charge cavalry; the reaction to this was not a reintroduction of pikemen, but rather the introduction of the bayonet (as said above). From the Dutch War onwards most European armies no longer had any pikemen, but rather relied on large numbers of musketeers with bayonets, supported by sabre cavalry. This was also the age in which the Grenadiers saw their rise to glory - they were the toughest of the musketeers, originally volunteers used to throw grenades into fortifications but later also seen as the new elite of the army.

The tactics of the day were generally very simple: to position the musketeers in long lines composed of small units (platoons), which ensured that at least 30 men were always firing at the enemy at any one time. The lines were supposed to be as broad as possible, so that at some point one army would outflank the other and thus roll up his line from the side. The musketeers were not trained to aim accurately; it was more important to fire in volleys than to fire accurately, because of the effect this had on the enemy's morale. The weapons weren't very accurate anyway...

 

plug bayonets get ride of the main prupose of the musket don't you think and you have to put it on in the battle field.

 

Plug bayonets were replaced by bayonets attached to the end of the barrel without blocking it, in a matter of years, sometimes decades. Obviously this was because a plug bayonet made the whole weapon nothing but a short pike instead of a gun.