The Art of Renaissance Warfare: From The Fall of Constantinople to the Thirty Years War

by Stephen Turnbull

‘non est castrum sed campus’ (is not a castle but a field).23

the Schwyz attained a particular reputation, so their name was adopted by the whole confederation after their humble spearmen had defeated an army of mounted knights at Morgarten in 1315.

four hundred Burgundian soldiers froze to death in the lines, and a certain Burgundian knight who suggested that Charles the Bold should be placed in a bombard and fired into Nancy was hanged for his impudence.

There can be few other examples in history of such a David-and-Goliath struggle, where a comparatively small organisation like the Swiss confederacy overthrows a larger one so completely that it disappears for ever.

campaign was very much an artillery war. Cannon began to play a major part in sieges, so that the Granada War marks the transition from trebuchet to gun, with the development of the latter on a massive scale.

Málaga was defended by a most impressive castle complex overlooking the harbour, much of which survives to this day.

Old stone balls were collected for recycling from where they were still lying on the ground at the site of Algeciras, having been collected for trebuchet use a century and a half earlier!

The former image of a Swiss pike square as an all-conquering steamroller, advancing steadily forward and simply crushing everything in its path, had ended at Bicocca.

In command of Erlau was Istvan (Stephen) Dobo, whose garrison was sustained by large quantities of the local red wine. Someone who saw the wine dripping from the whiskers of the defenders during the siege claimed that they were fortified by bulls’ blood, an appellation that has stuck for the local vintage to this day.

His lifeless corpse was borne back to Constantinople while those officials in the know pretended to keep up communication with him. Ottoman sources state that the pretence was maintained for three weeks, and that even the sultan’s personal physician was strangled as a precaution. A local tradition states that Suleiman’s body was laid to rest at Szigetvar and a mosque raised over the site which is now occupied by a church, but his corpse cannot have stayed there for long.

For some unaccountable reason nine hundred heavy arquebuses were sent out of the city to be used in the mountains, and the rest, which were correctly placed on the walls, were largely unused because ‘the soldiers did not know how to discharge them without setting fire to their beards’.

de Monluc despises bows and arrows for their short range and lack of hitting power compared to an arquebus ball, and there can be few people in history who have suffered an arrow in one arm and a bullet in the other and lived to compare the consequences.

With blood pouring from his mouth de Monluc ordered his men to continue the assault while he withdrew to the rear. It was soon discovered that the bullet had removed half his face. He eventually recovered from the wound, but was horribly disfigured and chose to wear a mask for the last few years of his life.

Just as others before him had denounced the bombard and the arquebus, so la Noue calls the pistol a ‘devilish’ weapon, which, he reckons, ‘was invented in some mischievous shop to turn whole realms . . . into desolation and replenish the graves with dead carcases.

Curiously, this view of the wheel-lock pistol as essentially an upper-class battlefield weapon was by no means the official reaction to its appearance early in the sixteenth century, when its reception was profoundly negative.

It was noted then that the absence of a smouldering match meant that a pistol could be concealed on the person of an assassin or a thief, and for this reason Emperor Maximilian tried in 1518 to have them banned throughout the empire.

In 1532 the city council of Nuremberg, whose workshops had rapidly become a major centre of production, complained that the ban was both ineffective and unnecessary. All that it had done was to deprive law-abiding citizens of these weapons, w...

They were often called cuirassiers, because they wore the full armour and helmet of the knight, with the exception of leg armour, which they discarded in favour of long, stout leather boots – a mode of dress that was soon to become very familiar on the battlefields of western Europe.

bands of Dutch musketeers left their frozen citadel to attack them, apparently gliding across the surface of the ice with the help of strange blades fastened to the soles of their boots! Hundreds of Spanish soldiers were killed, and when, after twenty-four hours of resistance, the ice castle finally melted, it had done its job and the ships escaped.9

By detaching the fate of Antwerp and the lands to the south from the United Provinces of The Netherlands he had effectively created a recognisable and workable border. In 1648, as part of the Treaty of Westphalia, this border was to be given both recognition and reality, confirming that Alexander Farnese, Duke of Parma, had invented Belgium.

Stefan Bathory, the Transylvanian prince who became King of Poland

Ivan the Terrible – the first Muscovite ruler to take the grand title of tsar.

Few communities could afford to erect elaborate stone castles and walls.

When they are defending towns the Russians give no thought to their lives. They steadfastly man the walls and defend the ditch, fighting night and day regardless of whether they have been torn by shot or steel or hurled into the air by mines, or whether their rations have run out and they are dying of hunger. They will not surrender, for their one concern is the welfare of the realm.

the most famous English mercenaries in history – a certain Captain John Smith. Long before he ventured to the Americas, where his association with Pocahontas was to create a legend, Smith had already achieved a formidable reputation as a soldier of fortune. He first served in the Low Countries, then entered on a journey to the east that was to provide him with some stirring adventures with which even his future exploits in America could scarcely compete.