Early modern warfare
The beginning of Early modern warfare corresponds to the use of gunpowder and development of suitable weapons to utilise the explosive.
Gunpowder weapons had been used in China since the 10th century mostly in the form of rockets. Cannon appeared several centuries later in Europe. For a long time gunpowder weapons were large, unwieldy and difficult to deploy and mainly used for attacking castles and other defences, a task which was equally well suited to undermining or non-explosive weapons.
These cumbersome weapons are best regarded as items from late medieval warfare, the first early modern war would not really start until gunpowder weapons became portable. The harquebus was one of the first firearms that were relatively light (they still required a stand to balance them) and could be operated by one person. One of these weapons were first recorded as being used in the Battle of Agincourt in 1415, which despite that was very much a medieval battle but the weapon had started to develop.
Weaponry is often placed at the forefront of technological advancement and the invention of the harquebus soon began an arms race. The useful but still unwieldy weapon was refined and reduced in size through many rapid developments culminating in the smoothbore musket.
These small, portable, personal weapons, which could fire projectiles over rapidly increasing distances with greater accuracy, heralded the growth of modern warfare. This is what makes the period of early modern warfare so short lived, there was almost a direct leap from the medieval to the modern. Early modern history may mark a gradual change in peoples ideas of art, society, philosophy and technology but the one place these changes ere not slow is warfare.
This was also the time of the beginning of exploration and colonial expansion and the lack of any significant intermediary period of early modern warfare proved decisive. Peoples in The Americas and Africa fighting with medieval or even ancient warfare techniques meeting the musket were at a great disadvantage and the ease with which these lands were taken displayed the gap between the two eras and their technology.
See also
References
- Keegan, John. The face of battle : a study of Agincourt, Waterloo, and the Somme. London : Barrie & Jenkins, 1988.
- Paret, Peter. Gordon A. Craig. Felix Gilbert. ed. Makers of modern strategy : from Machiavelli to the nuclear age. Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, c1986.
