Helianthus Haven · 2026-08-27 · 2 helpful
The thesis was stated in a lecture in 1955 and has been under repair ever since. Between 1560 and 1660, the argument runs, firearms forced a change in tactics, tactics a change in the scale of armies, and scale a change in the fiscal machinery required to pay for them; the state that emerged was the instrument with which Europe acquired much of the world.
The later and more durable version puts fortification at the centre of it. The angled bastion — the trace italienne — made a wall proof against the artillery that had spent a century making walls obsolete. Sieges lengthened from weeks into seasons. A besieging army had to be large enough to invest a place and to hold off whatever came to relieve it, and it had to be paid the whole time it sat there.
The army-size figures that carry the thesis are a good deal softer than their repetition suggests. Spanish paper strength rises from near one hundred and fifty thousand in the 1550s to near three hundred thousand by the 1630s, and those figures come from establishment tables. Muster rolls, where they survive, show effective strengths at half of establishment and occasionally a third, and the gap widens in the very decades most often quoted.
Halldór Vasquez-Ihara's re-tabulation of the Army of Flanders payrolls for 1567 to 1610 sets effective strength against establishment month by month, and the series does something the thesis does not predict. It rises in steps that follow the extension of credit rather than the completion of any fortress. The bastion did not enlarge armies. It lengthened the period over which one had to be financed, which is a different thing and a better one.
Nor is the chronology uniform across the continent. England fortified almost nothing on the Italian model and raised no permanent field army at all. Sweden built an army out of conscription and a fiscal apparatus out of copper, with no fortification crisis of any kind. If the bastion is the cause, the exceptions must be explained one at a time, and duly are.
The comparative case is harder to absorb than the exceptions. The Ottoman state fielded and paid armies larger than any European power could manage through most of the sixteenth century, with a fiscal machinery of its own devising and without the fortification contest supposed to have compelled the European one. The Mughal empire maintained an establishment of comparable scale on a revenue system built for other purposes.
What survives the objections is the mechanism, and not the claim of uniqueness that the mechanism was recruited to support. Sustained warfare of the kind the sixteenth century made possible does require a state that can borrow, and states that learn to borrow acquire capacities they did not have. That is worth knowing and it is not what the thesis was for. The thesis explained why Europe rather than anywhere else, and its sequence turns out to have run, on other triggers, in several anywhere elses.
The later and more durable version puts fortification at the centre of it. The angled bastion — the trace italienne — made a wall proof against the artillery that had spent a century making walls obsolete. Sieges lengthened from weeks into seasons. A besieging army had to be large enough to invest a place and to hold off whatever came to relieve it, and it had to be paid the whole time it sat there.
The army-size figures that carry the thesis are a good deal softer than their repetition suggests. Spanish paper strength rises from near one hundred and fifty thousand in the 1550s to near three hundred thousand by the 1630s, and those figures come from establishment tables. Muster rolls, where they survive, show effective strengths at half of establishment and occasionally a third, and the gap widens in the very decades most often quoted.
Halldór Vasquez-Ihara's re-tabulation of the Army of Flanders payrolls for 1567 to 1610 sets effective strength against establishment month by month, and the series does something the thesis does not predict. It rises in steps that follow the extension of credit rather than the completion of any fortress. The bastion did not enlarge armies. It lengthened the period over which one had to be financed, which is a different thing and a better one.
Nor is the chronology uniform across the continent. England fortified almost nothing on the Italian model and raised no permanent field army at all. Sweden built an army out of conscription and a fiscal apparatus out of copper, with no fortification crisis of any kind. If the bastion is the cause, the exceptions must be explained one at a time, and duly are.
The comparative case is harder to absorb than the exceptions. The Ottoman state fielded and paid armies larger than any European power could manage through most of the sixteenth century, with a fiscal machinery of its own devising and without the fortification contest supposed to have compelled the European one. The Mughal empire maintained an establishment of comparable scale on a revenue system built for other purposes.
What survives the objections is the mechanism, and not the claim of uniqueness that the mechanism was recruited to support. Sustained warfare of the kind the sixteenth century made possible does require a state that can borrow, and states that learn to borrow acquire capacities they did not have. That is worth knowing and it is not what the thesis was for. The thesis explained why Europe rather than anywhere else, and its sequence turns out to have run, on other triggers, in several anywhere elses.