Spanish Military Power and the Military Revolution

Abstract

Almost fifty years ago, in a seminal essay, Michael Roberts described the massive modernization of European armies in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as a ‘military revolution’. This transformation, which according to Roberts began around 1560, involved primarily a substantial increment in the scale and cost of armies and warfare, resulting from the advent of standing armies and of new tactics based on the use of firearms by smaller groups of soldiers instead of massive infantry charges. This was accompanied by a professionalization of military leadership, and a rise in the sophistication and complexity of the government offices that dealt with warfare (Roberts, 1995). Roberts used the Spanish army as a contrast to the allegedly progressive Dutch and other northern European armies, and his successors, scholars such as Maury Feld, Raffaele Puddu and others, have largely accepted this paradigm. The most important exceptions are the work of René Quatrefages and Geoffrey Parker, but even the latter makes important concessions to Roberts’s views on this matter. In a monograph with The Military Revolution as the first part of its title, Parker gave the Roberts thesis a new lease of life, and included within its parameters the development of new ‘Italian design’ fortifications and the ocean-going warship (Parker, 1988). Despite some revisionist efforts, the notion that a tactically and structurally retrograde Spanish military contributed to the decline of Spain remains an issue. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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