Interesting. I'm still not totally convinced, though. But maybe I am underestimating 15th and 16th century heavy horse.

Quote:

Even with the finest Gendarmerie though, charging a solid pike square was no panacea. The Swiss regularly absorbed such punishment and retained their cohesion, and occasionally the Landsknechts did too. It was indeed a matter of discipline and training.

Are you saying that unsupported cavalry charges regularly defeated non-Swiss pikemen?

One of the keys to successfully charging solid infantry formations was firepower, yours and theirs. In the Napoleonic period it was standard practice for cavalry to threaten infantry, forcing them into square, which then made a beautiful artillery target. Bombarding squares was one of the main uses of horse artillery. Once the artillery had done enough damage, the horse could charge. The same thing was done at Falkirk in (IIRC) 1297, with a Scots pike schiltron, archers providing the firepower and knights completing the victory. In the case of the 16th and 17th centuries (the great age of European cavalry warfare-at no other time have armies had remotely as high a proportion of cavalry) firepower and shock was combined in the form of pistoleers (normally called cuirassiers), harquebusiers and carabiniers (armed with the arquebus and the carbine respectively). Faced with formed pikemen they could pour fire into them until the pikemen lost cohesion and could be ridden down.

This leads me to infantry firepower. I am not aware of a single instance of an unbombarded Napoleonic square who had loaded muskets being broken. There are many instances of squares with unloaded muskets being broken. If the bayonet armed infantry could hold fire until the charge was launched, the combination of a point blank volley and the bayonet was invincible. This is why pike formations in the 16th century started to have musketeers attached, and why the proportion of musketeers increased steadily between 1600 and 1700, until pikes were finally abandoned in favour of bayonets.

One point worth adding is that the relative length of weapons matters also. The knight's lance exceeded the reach of a halberd, but a pike matched or maybe exceeded the lance in length. Which ever side has the longer weapon has an advantage. Once gendarmes and other lance-armed types disappeared, the long pike was unneeded also, and a bayonet had enough reach to hold off sword-armed cavalry. This balance was altered, although not upset, by the reappearance of lancers in the Napoleonic wars. The light Polish style lance had enough reach to outreach a bayonet. However, few men were adequately trained in using a lance at this time; lancers were also considered light cavalry, which was less likely to be used against formed infantry, so the lance was a nuisance rather than a deadly threat.

For what it's worth, I may have found where some of the "Heroic Zwiehander" imagery stems from. I was re-reading Hans Delbrück's "History of the Art of Warfare", and in Volume IV, 'The Dawn of Modern Warfare', it goes into the Swiss and German Pike Square tactics of the early 16th century.

One of the references Delbrück uses over and over is a book published in 1522 that was an old Soldier's account of the Italian wars, and an overview of the tactics used. I can't recall the German title right now, but Delbrück believes that it was Frundsberg himself writing anonymously.

In this book, the Author describes Frundsberg in one engagement standing at the front of his Pikes, along with a few other two handed swordsmen, "...hewing the spears as an Axeman among Oaks" (paraphrased, but the image is essentially the same).

I'll dig up the exact title this evening and pass it along (clearly I need to get a copy... :) , but with this kind of powerful imagery, it's easy to see how one could run with it, and depict *ALL* of the Landsknecht as these brave two-handed swordsmen mowing down Pike Squares against all odds... :)

"... I think one could quite easily state that the difference between Medieval and Early Modern armies is that the former was comprised of Warriors, while the latter was made up of Soldiers, and that a smaller, disciplined force almost always beats the larger undisciplined one, even if the later is man-for-man much superior. "

These two statements are both quite true, although I am not sure how they truly relate to each other. One could characterize warriors as being fighters by upbringing and tradition, while soldiers are fighters who are trained by a government whose army they join. Both may be full-time fighters, and both can be mercenaries. This notion ties into one reason for the prevalence of firearms over other missile weapons - that any able-bodied man could learn to use one in a few weeks, and could kill (if lucky) a fighter of any degree of skill in almost any armour. Soldiers can be readily and cheaply replaced. Social historians and economic historians naturally concentrate on the organization (especially financial) which allowed the creation of siege trains and the hiring of mercenary armies.

The second half of the sentence is very much true. However, there are a few circumstances in which warriors trumped soldiers. This is, I think, the case in Ireland in the 16th century. The Gaels were most definitely not soldiers, but for that particular kind of war they held their own against English soldiers for a very long time, until they joined their Spanish allies in fighting a conventional style war.

Here is the Fründsberg reference I mentioned earlier:

'Trewer Rath und Bedencken eines Alten wol versutchen und Erfahrenen Kriegsmans'
(Trans. : "True Advice and Reflections of an Old Well-tested and Experienced Warrior")

"...in the battle of La Motta (1513) he (Fründsberg) stood in the first rank, swung his sword and fought like a woodsman who was felling an Oak in the forest..."

Tres Butch! :)

"With regards to mass halberds the Swiss were the only one to emply that particlar weapon in large numbers without large numbers of pikes and/or missile weaposn in support. And the Swiss always fougth from behind obstaclesor in broken terrain to increase the difficulties for any attacking cavalry. Once the Swiss started to move outside the confines of the valleys and forrests of the Confedracy they added pikes to their mix of arms. so they obviously didn't belive in that halberd alone was suffcient for cavalry defence. "

The Swiss at Laupen, 1339, (Bernese and Forest Cantons, that is) did not fight from behind obstacles or in broken terrain. The Bernese and their allies attacked down a slope, and while the Bernese routed the infantry of Freiburg and various feudal lords, the men of the Forest Cantons charged into the front of the formed mass of feudal horsemen. They could not and did not force their way further forward, but were promptly surrounded. Their weapon was principally the halberd, and they held their ground against the men-at-arms until the Bernese could rally and attack the horsemen from the rear. This is 80 years before Arbedo. It would seem the halberd was a reasonably good anti-cavalry weapon. At Arbedo and Sempach, it was dismounted men-at-arms with lances who discomforted the halberd-wielding Swiss.

Benjamin;

My point about sword and shield was that it was in fact effective against pikes, but absolutely not when the pikes were well supported by Horse. Machiavelli waxed eloquent in Arte della Guerra about them, but needless to say, as you well note, the Spaniards didn't keep them long at all. Their one major victory, if you can call it that, was Ravenna. Indeed, only Maurice of Nassau seems to have been considering using Targeteers to any extent, and that seems to be more due to the classical model, just as was Machiavelli. I think that Machiavelli was the only one to seriously advocate a mass return to the Shield, and all of the professional soldiers ignored him. And your point vis-a-vis Flodden is well taken: there were high casualties on both sides, the English from the original Scots impact, the Scots from the melee.

The sources you are quoting are great, BTW, and you have some stuff that I haven't managed to track down as of yet. And agreed, the later 16th Century authors aren't exactly promoting cavalry charges as the be-all and end-all of a battle (though Walhausen certainly seems to have thought they still had merit as late as 1616, and I was under the impression that Sir Roger Williams had some notion of the effectiveness of "Launtiers" against Foote). However, there certainly were commanders who behaved that way! :D Louis, Prince of Conde, and the head of the Protestant Cause in France for one. His idea of how to win a battle was with a smashing cavalry charge. It was his gendarmes in fact who were unsuccessfully charging through the Swiss pike square at Dreux in 1562. However his nephew and successor, Henri of Navarre, used cavalry tactics quite successfully a generation later. Excuse my lack of quotes here, due to my library being in boxes at the moment, but at Coutras, after defeating the Catholic Horse, Henri turned his Horse on the Catholic Infantry and destroyed them in detail, much as the Anglo-Dutch did at Tournhout. Yes, they made good use of firearms, both against the opposing Horse as well as Foot, but mostly to blow holes into the formations and charge in with the Sword. This in particular was Henri's tactic: a combined use of pistol and sword together. (I have a great article that a friend, Ron Love, wrote entitled "All the King's Horsemen: the Equestrian Army of Henri IV" published in the 16th Century Journal back in '93. GREAT research on this stuff. Try to track it down if you can, it's worth the effort.)

My illustration of Dreux, with the Huguenot Heavy Horse going through the Swiss, was more to illustrate that Horse could do such a thing. However, all of the witnesses expected the result to be quite different, with the Swiss breaking. That they did not made it quite a remarkable feat. Indeed, the French Horse went through their Landsknecht opponents at Ceresole too, without breaking them, and in both instances took heavy casualties in the process. But at Dreux, the Huguenot Horse had already broken the Royalist Infantry made up of Frenchmen, which was of course not terribly highly regarded at the time (or am I thinking of St. Denis? Dang, mind like a seive...). And the French Heavy and Light Horse made the victory of Ceresole possible by slowing down first the Italian Foote, and then the Landsknechtes on the other parts of the field long enough for the Gascon and Swiss Infantry to destroy them. Indeed, these were not sole Horse victories, but the battle would certainly not have had the same result without the French perponderance of Horse.

Per Ravenna, you caught me in gross error on that one (gotta dig out those books...). I had forgotten that the French had Landsknecht's that year. Indeed, certainly one of the Spanish pike columns, (festooned with sword and buckler men), fended off quite successfully the charges of the French horse, resulting in the foolish death of Gaston de Foix, the French commander after the battle was already won. But it was the charge of the French Horse through the breaks in the ditch that Navarro had set up to defend (after they had run off the Spanish Horse, which charged prematurely due to infilading French artillery fire) that broke up the Spanish Infantry. Granted, it was a charge on the flanks and the rear while the Spaniards were paying attention to their front, but it certainly did the trick, and the Spaniards were not shaken at the time.

Since the original question for this thread was more to do with short weapons vs Horse, I still believe that Heavy Horse on the pattern of the compaigne d'ordonnance could fairly easily deal with MOST formations of short weapons. Pikes were there in fact to provide a wall or hedge that was effective against such a force, and for the most part, I think it was quite successful in that. Heck, they would have dropped it quicky had it not been. And although occasionally charges by Heavy Horse were successful in breaking Infantry, their primary value was in either holding Infantry's attention, allowing them to be smashed with artillery (such as at Marignano in 1515) or other Infantry (Ceresole, 1544). Running down disheartened Infantry after their Cavalry had been run off (Mookerheyde 1578 [I think I have that one right]), Courtras, 1586 and Tournout remained fairly ususual. Tournhout especially in that it was almost entirely a Cavalry force on the Ango-Dutch side which defeated a combined arms Spanish army on the march (and indeed, it was primarily Pistolier Cavalry that did this trick, as the Spaniards were the only ones in the field to have Lances that day). Intelligent use of firearms, indeed, but fulfilling the tactical precepts of that form of Horse, i.e. Pistoliers.

Anyway, you're keeping me on my toes, that's for sure, and making me think out my answers, LOL! And I applaud your good use of the primary sources, and I'm sure you'll find plenty to pick apart in the above missive, :D .

Cheers,

Gordon

>since it was the total lack of coordination between his Horse, Foote and Artillery that lost him the battle, rather than the tactical briliance of the Marquis de Pescara

Hey! No discounting Giovanni Delle Bande Nere's sudden departure from the field due to an untimely case of *dead*.. ;)

Francis lost I think somewhere around 1000-2000 shot with that (Giova's boys went home.... :), and if I'm remembering the layout of the park, they would've been along the path of the "secret march".

Us Italian re-enactors often contemplate a world without a Siege of Florence and Sack of Rome.... :)


One thing I did want to add was that while some of those 16th Authors certainly do cite *not* to use Cavalry to charge straight at companies of foot, that's not to say they *don't* use Cavalry to charge the foot. 'Straight' is the operative word to consider.

I've not cracked open all of the references tossed out there, but Mendoza's comments were actually in regards to a tactic he used where he took "a fift" of his Infantry, and proceeded to push an assault on the opponent's Flank. As the opponent turned to meet the threat, Mendoza had 25 Light horse charge the Center, which had now become oblique, and broke the opponent's Reiters left to defend the Flank, as well as the Infantry beyond. He doesn't attribute the above success to anything other than his Light Horse.

BTW, that success aside, Mendoza still clings to his Lancers, and says he needs only 125 of them to run down 500 Argoleteers, or "Swarte Ruyters"... :)