How Did The Military Revolution Change

The military revolution that occurred in Europe from 1560 to 1660 arguably represented the first signs of modernity for European and Western armies. As Geoffrey Parker describes in his book, The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500-1800, European armies before this military revolution conducted a preponderance of their wars using siege warfare against highly developed fortifications reminiscent of the age . This preponderance, however, began to change in Europe during a military revolution from 1560 to 1660, which would rebalance warfare towards more open combat in battle . This rebalance of warfare occurred because of changes in the tactics, the lethality, and the costs of war. Additionally, these changes
The Cambridge Illustrated History of Warfare, edited by Geoffrey Parker, attributes the beginnings of this change to Maurice de Nassau, a Dutch royal family member who developed a new method to employing musketeers in battle in the 1590s . Before Nassau’s development, European musketeers fought in large, slow-moving square formations with pikemen for defense ; the Spanish tercio unit had followed this tactic with much success . Nassau, who was fighting the Spanish at that time, arranged his musketeer units into long, thin, linear formations in order to use a volley firing system that had not been employed effectively as a tactic since Roman times . The tactic proved quite successful in battle and quickly spread to other parts of Europe , eventually making linear formations of musketeers the new standard in European
One of the more poignant of these occurred during the Battle of Breitenfeld, where Swedish forces killed almost 8,000 enemy soldiers in an hour—mostly through gunfire . By the end of the battle, the Swedish had decimated two-thirds of the enemy’s forces . This victory allowed Adolphus to operate freely throughout northern Europe for several months with an army that he then grew to 183,000 soldiers, a size considered enormous for the age . After hearing about the Swedish Army’s success in battle, other European states quickly copied Adolphus’s methods and countered with their own large armies and firepower . This ultimately created the modern military reliance on fielding large armies and employing greater levels of firepower against an enemy in battle.
A final aspect of the military revolution from 1560 to 1660 that changed warfare was the financial costs of war. As Parker describes, the size of European armies had grown substantially during this period . Understandably, this growth in army size lead to extra costs associated with paying, feeding, and supplying the soldiers . The rate at which the costs of war increased during this time was substantial. Using Spain as an example, the cost of fighting a war nearly quadrupled between 1547 and 1598 . Former methods of funding war through tax collection, land sales, or loans could not match these rising costs