The Dispatches on War (Part II)

The undulating nature of warfare changed once more. It was during the balance of power created after 1648 that wars came to create the impression that it was the state, which influenced war. Wars were considered as the extension of the monarch’s powers and wars were limited in their duration not by the lethality of the battlefield, but by the economic costs of maintaining professional armies. The Thirty Years War bankrupted the Spanish Hapsburgs and Spain and Europe learned that increasing costs of waging war were directly linked to the economic strengths of a nation. The new development in this time period was “the military revolution”, which was a fusion of economics, technology and military tactics in warfare.

Military revolution suggested that Europe had to continually modernize its armed forces and to keep them modern; it had to buy new technologies and integrate them into its armies. The military revolution was the by-product of the political struggles, which plagued Europe in the 1500s and the 1600s. In a historic caveat, it was the military revolution that would be responsible for the rise of Europe and the eclipse of the non-European nations by the end of the 1600s. In a technological sense, Europe was more backward than the powers of China, India, Japan and Turkey and to the casual observer, it would have seemed improbable that Europe would end up dominating the globe. Europe was geographically fractured, politically decentralized and economically poor.

The rise of Europe as a world power was the result of the self-imposed isolation of the non-European powers. China was the greatest power at a time, when Europe was still fighting to survive politically. China had a centralized bureaucracy, which made it easy to administer its rule and China had an army, which most European monarchs would dream about but scarcely hope to command. Its industrial capacity was immense and, China was producing coal in amounts, which would not be rivaled in Europe till the 1700s. Under the Ming dynasty, which was ruling China, China chose to turn its back on the world and ended all contact with the outside world. It was not that Europe outclassed China but that China refused to participate in the competition of the nations and became a reclusive nation. In doing so, China not only stagnated politically, but it also economically and militarily and would be in no position to resist the Europeans, when they would arrive at its shores a few hundred years later.

The same parallel applied to Japan. Like China, Japan was a highly bureaucratic and centralized power. As in the case of China, it was the internal politics of Japan, which forced Japan to shun outside contacts and become an insular nation. Though Japan was not as economically strong as China, it still had an advantage over the Europeans in the sense that it was politically and culturally homogenous. Unlike China, Japan was not averse to outside trade and it was in regular contact with the Dutch and the Portuguese merchants, who visited its harbors and established trade relations. In fact, Japan was more open to European presence than India or China and allowed them the maximum leeway in conducting their business and making profits.

The Japanese isolationism resulted from the civil wars, which preceded the rise of the Tokuguwa shogunate in the middle 1600s. The civil war was an internal struggle of the Japanese clans to dominate Japan and in this war; the Dutch and Portuguese were active as the suppliers of military technology to the Japanese warlords. In the process of arming the warlords, the Dutch and the Portugese also started to compete for power and deny each other trading rights in Japan by supporting rival warlords. This open political and military support, to the Japanese warlords, created a proxy war between Netherlands and Portugal and it was fought to incorporate Japan into their respective Asian empires. The Dutch were already established in the Far East, as a colonial power, and the Portugese were eager to secure a toehold in Asia, from where they could balance Spain’s colonial power based in the Philippines.

The Japanese warlords were tolerant of the Europeans, because they needed the European military technology to defeat their rivals. In the process, Japan developed highly efficient armies, and it was fighting large-scale battles, with muskets and artillery, which would not be seen, or replicated, in Europe till the Thirty Years War. The Japanese soldiery was armed with the latest military technology and the causality figures proved the destructive nature of war, as the Japanese dead started to increase in proportion to the military technology used in combat. Consequently, Japan was one of the first nations to earn the distinction of being a “gunpowder empire”. A gunpowder empire was considered as a political entity that sought to consolidate power through military technology and its political authority was based on the levels of its military technology. Another feature of the gunpowder empires was that they relied on imported military technology, for maintaining political power, but they lacked the means to produce the required military technology domestically.

Therefore, the war making capacity of the Japanese was pegged on their access to weapons technology and without it; the Japanese warlords’ quest for political power was meaningless. The Tokugawa clan, which eventually won the civil war, understood this reality and to secure its power from any political challenges, it outlawed the use of muskets and European military technology. All the weapons were confiscated and the Europeans were forced to leave Japan. To replace the changed nature of war, the Tokugawa shoguns instituted the cult of the Bushido, or the way of the warrior and emphasized personal bravery over technology. The result of this was that Japan would not modernize its forces and it would gradually become an underdeveloped military power. The decline of the Japanese military also mirrored the political decline of Japan, because when Commodore Perry’s fleet of American naval ships anchored in Tokyo Bay in the 1850s and demanded Japan trade with the United States, Japan was in no position to resist that demand.

However, all this was in the future and to the Tokugawa shoguns the only thing, which mattered, was the political security of their power and to maintain it, they banned European military technology. The reason behind the ban was a fear of the European technology and for this reason; Japan opted for a political isolationism. To the Tokugawa, the Europeans and their ability to trade military technology was a more grave danger than the political insurrection of the rival Japanese clans. If the Tokugawa were to consolidate power, they had to deny their rivals to the means, which could resist the power of the Tokugawa shogunate. Furthermore, as the European technology was expensive, it was difficult to buy given that the finances of the Tokugawa revenues was still based on the feudal rent collection system of medieval Japan. This made it exceedingly difficult for the Tokugawa shogunate to compete in an arms race, with the other clans and to solve the problem; they simply decided to outlaw the arms race itself.

The relative decline of Mughul India, as a major power in the same time period, can also be explained as the failure of the Muslim rule to create a viable polity. Mughul rule never amounted to more than a series of dynastic rule. Even under the Mughul rule, considered as the greatest period of Muslim rule, the sub-continent was more a collection of warring states and was not unified in a political or an administrative sense. Mughul India was also an example of a “gunpowder empire” and it would also decline due to the Mughuls’ inability to match the European weapons technology, which was being imported into the region, courtesy of the British India Company. There was no modernization or reforms carried out under the Mughuls and the society under the Mughuls was a case of the minority ruling a majority. Instead of laying the foundations of their rule, the Mughuls lavished their time and money on an exceedingly opulent court, petty rivalries supported by a regressive taxation system.

The Mughul governors were tasked with a quota of taxes, without any instructions on how to collect the revenues. The result was the systematic abuse of the population, as the governors indulged in oppressive taxation, which increased the levels of corruption in the empire. Since Delhi was only interested in receiving its share of the monies and was not too concerned as to how it was raised, unscrupulous governors overtaxed the population. As there was no accountability, the governors amassed a personal fortune from the miseries of the people. The money was never reinvested in any area of Mughul administration and this also true of the army. Consequently, the Mughul army at the time of the rebellion against the British in 1857 was still pre-dominantly equipped with the weapons technology, which it had in 1526.

The Mughul rule was so precarious that it was not possible for the Mughuls to sustain it militarily and its prolongation was due to the avoidance of wars than in winning wars. The decline of the Mughul Empire became obvious when it found itself pressed to defend its territory against the Marathas and the Afghans. Against these two groups, the Mughuls were able to hold their own, because the level of the weapons technology was relatively the same, and due to the occasional brilliance of its generals, the empire continued to exist. However, this could not be said of the Mughul experience, with the British because they were simply overawed by the more advanced British advantages in artillery and musketry.

Another major power, of the time, which collapsed due to internal reasons, was Ottoman Turkey. Unlike China or India or Japan, which were choosing isolationism, Turkey was an expansionist power and was experiencing a political resurgence. The Turkish graph of power was quite similar to those of the other Muslim nations, which were the fastest growing powers in the sixteenth century. Of all the Muslim threats, the Turkish threat was the greatest to Europe and it is no wonder that Europe breathed a sigh of relief when the Turkish armies marched against Egypt and Arabia in the early 1500s. Even though the Muslims were evicted from Spain at the end of the 1400s, the Muslim armies were advancing in Eastern Europe and Bulgaria and Serbia were already under the rule of the Turks. Hungary, the last remaining bastion of Christiandom, was bravely resisting the Turkish onslaught, but was finding the Turkish artillery to too powerful to refute.

In 1526, at the Battle of Mochas, the Turks finally overrun Hungary and only Austrian power capable seemed capable of resisting the Turks. The Turks were never able to conqueror Austria but they presented a constant threat to Austria and besieged Vienna twice; once in 1529 and then in 1683. The Turks were also a formidable force in the Mediterranean Sea. To prepare for the siege of Constantinople in 1453, the Turks created a strong navy to prevent the Europeans from sending help to the Byzantine Empire from the sea. In the process, the Turks were able to increase their influence in the Black Sea and the Aegean Sea, after they had defeated the Most Serene Kingdom of Venice for the control over the islands of Rhodes, Crete and Cyprus. With the defeat of the Byzantine Empire, the Ottoman Turks dominated both the sea and land trade routes, which linked Europe with Asia and Middle East. The Turkish control of the Mediterranean meant that, with the Turkish rule over North Africa, the Turkish navy was raiding ports in Italy and Spain.

The rapid expansion of the Turkish power was due to the willingness of the Turks to employ the military revolution, which enabled the Turkish armies to best the Europeans militarily. The Turkish military not only benefited from the superior cannon making skills of the Turks, but it also gained from the openness of the Turks to employ skilled Europeans to increase their military advantages. The Ottoman’s policy of recruiting Christian janissaries brought in an influx of European talent and at the siege of Constantinople; the most senior and skilled gun-maker in the Ottoman Empire’s army was a Hungarian Jew. The tolerance of the Ottoman Turks for other races and religion and the willingness of the Ottoman Empire to accept the Spanish Jews, forced into exile by Catholic Spain, brought many talented non-Muslims into the service of the sultans. The Jews not only brought a cache of administrative talent with them, but also brought a vast network of finances, which the Sublime Porte was able to use for its own ends.

The Turkish armies were not superior to the Europeans in terms of combat tactics or doctrine, but due to its superior weapons for which the Europeans had no response. When the Turks were knocking at the gates of Vienna, it was not the Turkish infantry but the Turkish artillery that caused the Europeans much angst. Yet paradoxically, it was the military success of the Turks, which would prove to be their biggest military weakness. The Ottoman Empire had expanded so rapidly and the Turkish army was so spread out in guarding its gains that it became over extended. As the sixteenth century began to trot towards the seventeenth century, the Turkish armies were in engaged in North Africa, Cyprus; in the Crimea against the Romonov Russia and in the Red Sea and in the Mediterranean, the Turkish navy was an added financial burden on the empire’s exchequer.

During this entire period, the Turks never bothered about the modernization of their armed forces. The Turks were never concerned about the steady transfer of weapons technology to the European lands and increased refinements in European metallurgical skills, which were steadily improving the quality of the European cannons. While the Europeans were modernizing their forces and increasing pressure on the periphery of the Ottoman Empire in Europe, the Turkish response was sedate. By the 1700s, the Turks were discovering the sheer the difficulty of ruling their empire, because the empire was turning out to be an economic drain for Constantinople. The Turks were incapable of modernizing their army, because the cost of garrisoning Eastern Europe, in terms of manpower and equipment, was proving too costly for the sultans.

The Turkish power also declined as the sultans became pre-occupied with maintaining their power and engaged in palace intrigues, which weakened the centralized nature of the Turkish rule. Ottoman Turkey had a very fine bureaucracy, but it was subject to bad rulers and the Turkish bureaucracy and its centralized system of government suffered from the rule of thirteen ineffective rulers, who ruled Turkey consecutively. The Turkish military offered the Europeans a critical window of opportunity, when it tended to ignore the defense of the empire’s frontiers and started to concentrate on its role of a political kingmaker. The military became involved in politics of the empire and while it was playing politics, the Turkish military pressure was removed from Europe, which was able to organize itself against the Ottomans.

Ironically, the European strengths were the exact opposite of the Turkish strengths. Unlike Ottoman Turkey or Ming China or even Mughul India, Europe was decentralized and fragmented and the kingdoms in Europe were always engaged in wars to secure their political existence. There was a very strong economic rivalry in Europe and there was a dire need, politically, for Europe to search for ways to modernize its armies or face obsolescence. The European wars encouraged the growth of an arms industry, which was quite profitable, because each weapons technology produced created its own counter-weapons technology and the result was a spiral of military technological innovations. This facet of the Europe, when coupled with the realization that all of this activity was taking place, as Europe was in transition from the politics of feudalism to those of the nation-states, added another dimension to the military revolution in Europe.

The collapse of the feudalism in Europe meant that political power was shifting from the feudal barons to the merchant classes. This shift in power came about as the merchants generated monies through trade and were able to negotiate with the kings for the grant of political rights and privileges in exchange for paying taxes. In return for taxing the merchants, the kings had to promise to secure for the merchants a safe and stable trading and political environment and a uniformed set of laws. The first step in this process was to bring to heel the various feudal lords under the authority of one ruler and therefore, as Europe fought wars of political consolidation, it needed access to weapons technology to establish its sovereign writ. Once this process was completed and the rudimentary façade of the nation-states had started to emerge, Europe became involved in wars of expansion and territorial adjustments, all of which needed and relied on an industry capable of producing military weapons.

Hence, as Europe emerged out of the medieval ages, the European economy was progressing from an agrarian economy to one, which was based on war and war became a major incentive towards the growth of the European economy over the non-European economies. Whereas, the weapons technology and the ability to produce weapons in China, Turkey and India was a state monopoly, it was the free market forces in Europe, which determined the supply and demand of weapons. Every European nation had a demand for the latest weapons technology and such technology was openly available to the highest bidder regardless of nationality or political differences. Consequently, wars in Europe became strengths of economic power and wars were being fought with a frequency, by which the warring nations could afford the accoutrements of war.

The interplay of European economics with war can be summed up in the political experiences of the Spanish Habsburg Empire. The Habsburgs would dominate Europe from 1515 to 1659 and the failure of the Habsburgs was more a result of an economic reason than a military defeat. The Habsburg domination of Europe was accidental and there was no design on part of the Habsburgs to create a new Pax Romana. The rise of the Habsburgs, originally Austrian, was the result of Maximillian creating political alliances. Maxmillian had married Mary who ruled Burgundy, which was also in possession of Netherlands and in the process, had united the kingdoms of Austria and Burgundy and Burgundy controlled Netherlands into a political alliance. In pursuit of his alliances, Maxmillian married his son, Philip to Joan, the daughter of Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon.

Therefore, when Charles, the grandson of Maxmillian came to power in 1515 as the king of Spain (Charles I), he inherited the throne of Austria from his paternal grandfather; the kingdom of Burgundy and Netherlands from his paternal grandmother and the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon from his maternal grandparents along with the Spanish ruled Naples and the island of Sardinia. After the death of the childless king of Hungary in 1526, Charles was allowed by the Turks to claim the thrones of Hungary and Bohemia. Since the Austrian Habsburgs kings were also traditionally crowned as the emperors of the Holy Roman Empire, Charles I of Spain became Charles V of the Holy Roman Empire in 1519. By the 1530s, this accidental domination of Europe, by Spain, was being resisted by the kings of France, who had ambitions into expand into the Italy and who felt that Spain was encircling France’s power in Europe.

However, Charles V saw his scattered territories as an opportunity to unite all of Europe under his rule. Therefore, Charles V started to finance an army, which would allow him to rule Europe and money was liberally spend on the wars to build a huge Habsburg empire Europe. Charles V was helped by the fact that Spain was the richest of the all-European nations due to its sources of finances. One source was the inheritance tax of Castile, which was raised in form of a crusade tax on church property in Spain, and a sales tax, which was directly taxed in Spain and indirectly in all the lands under the Spanish Hapsburgs. Furthermore, there were additional incomes from the taxes levied on the trading states of Italy and Netherlands by Spain. Another source was the tax on the mining of silver and gold from Spain’s American colonies. Still another source was the rich merchant houses of southern Germany and there was also the possibility to raise loans by mortgaging Spain’s possessions to the bankers in Amsterdam, if the occasion warranted it.

All these finances allowed Spain to benefit from the military revolution in the form of a highly trained and well-equipped infantry force known as the Terico. The Terico was the first use of integrated firepower and included nearly 3,000 soldiers made up of pikemen, swordsmen, and arquebusiers. These soldiers were trained to mutually support one another and fight as a coherent military force, and it remained undefeated till the end of the Thirty Years War. The problem was that army was over deployed and as Spain’s commitments increased in Europe, it was finding it difficult to pay and maintain a standing army. The Terico was not only fighting the rebellious German princes in Germany supporting Martin Luther, but it was also periodically engaged in putting down the revolt in Netherlands against Spain, which lasted eighty years.

Unbelievably, the Spanish inflows of income proved too meager to support Spain’s wars, and Spain was forced to borrow money from the Amsterdam banks. The recourse to loans signaled the realization that Spanish credit had collapsed and as a result, inflation started to mushroom further devaluing the Spanish ducat. It was these galloping costs of war, which hindered Spain’s ability to fight as general and industrial inflation increased and correspondingly decreased the purchasing power of Spain between 1500 to 1650. While this was going, Spain’s finances suffered another setback, when the Netherlands refused to pay their taxes to the Spanish crown. To compound the problem, due to rampant corruption and poor financial administration, Spain was not even making the interest payments on its Dutch loans and would soon declare bankruptcy. As a result of this, it would be forced to hand over a significant part of ownership rights of its American mines to Dutch bankers and in the process, further depleted its access to monies.

Another reason, which contributed to the decline of Spain was even though it had the best military force in Europe, which was highly equipped and well trained, it lost because it was also continually fighting one war or another for nearly 150 years. While one European nation took time off, from fighting Spain, to reorganize itself economically, another European nation entered the fray. It became increasingly difficult and impossible for Spain to finance wars for nearly 150 years and more so, as the costs of paying for new military technology started to slip beyond Spain’s monetary grasp. The only advantage that Spain had over its European adversaries was its military technology and since it could not pay for new weapons, its armies stagnated technologically and soon, it was only a military power in terms of its numerical strengths. Consequently, the decline of the Habsburg power came when they had over-extended themselves economically and it was financially unable to support its military-political aims.

The reason why Spain (and the non-European powers) declined in comparison to Europe was due to their failure to pay the costs of war. Europe, given its political rivalries, was more open towards the logic of free market principles in the procurement of weapons technology than the centralized and command economies of the non-European powers. The lack of a highly restrictive bureaucracy and the emergence of a middle class meant that the monarchs of Europe were dependent on the commerce of war and could not limit its growth without undermining their own power. This was a major reason, why technological innovation could not happen in Mughul India or Ming China or Ottoman Turkey, because the authorities in those lands were always distrustful of any new change, which had the latent possibility of upsetting their political orthodoxies and thus, resisted such developments.

Europe was able to develop the symbiosis of an economy based on war with politics. This was the only point, which differed between European and non-European conduct of war. War, as it was understood, was a crude display of power and it was a power based more on physical intimidation of the population than a display of shrewd military tactics. Even the Spanish infantry, with its highly developed and sophisticated weapons was more a mob than an army and the arrival of an army was always greeted with fear in the local population. The military campaigns of the time were noted for their devastation of the lands as the troops would pillage and trample crops and the passage of armies would be followed by starvation. The soldiers of the time were interested in loot, rape and murder than in fighting and this was not an uncommon trait, because only the lowest dregs of the European society ended up in its armies.

As the nature of the war assumed an economic face, it was becoming clear that a military defeat or a victory was useless, because a strong economy would always allow the nation to field armies. This is why; the example of Habsburgs is instructive in the development of an economic theme in warfare. Spain, given its rich financial sources of revenues was able to buy the benefits of military revolution and Spain was never defeated in the wars, which preceded the Thirty Years War or the conflict itself. The Thirty Years War ended, when Austria which was the eastern part of the Habsburg Empire, refused to fund the war aims of the western half of the empire. The Thirty Years War ended when Spain, was no longer capable of continuing the war and called for an armistice. In a similar sense, Europe was not able to defeat Spain in nearly a century and a half of warfare, because the economic price of fighting was more expansive than the political cost of defeating Spain.

Another feature of the warfare was the political intensity of the war itself. Prior to the 1500s, wars in Europe were small-localized affairs fought between nations. After 1500s, the wars in Europe became transnational in their scope, and were being fought for key political issues of the day. The caveat, which increased the duration of the wars, was that most nations were willing to fight till they had won their political argument and were not willing to compromise and thus, end the wars. The only consideration, which over shadowed politics, was the economy of the nation. The reason being that it was usually the bourgeoisie, which would become alarmed at the rising costs of a war, which seemed to linger on without an end in sight and would refuse to financially support it through its taxes.

As the monarchs relied on the taxes of the middle class to invest in wars, they were mindful not to risk irking their sources of money lest the bourgeoisie refused to pay taxes. Also, the kings were mindful that if the wars continued excessively and they were forced to ask for more monies, they would have to bargain away some of their political power to the middle class to get the money. Therefore, there was a very practical limit on the duration of wars in the 1500s and the 1600s and it was based on the calculus of how much power was a king willing to give up in order to fight his political wars.

As the world moved towards the Thirty Years War, wars were being more influenced by economic criteria than the military necessity and there was not that much progress in military tactics, from 1500 to 1650. Military tactics were a lot closer to garrison duties and were more marked by their static nature of combat than by their mobility. However, the lessons of the Thirty Years War and the failure of the Spanish Habsburg were learned by the victors. France, which assumed the role of a major European power after 1648, was determined to avoid the mistakes of the Spain. Under the economic guidance of Jean-Baptise Colbert, France would embark on the economics of mercantilism and in process, would become one of the richest nations in Europe only to see its treasury emptied by the wasteful wars of Louis XIV.

The most important contribution of the new nature of the armed conflict was that it forced a new awareness of warfare. As Europe moved towards the close of the eighteenth century, it was becoming increasingly clear to the monarchies of Europe that a strong economy was vital to their war making powers. In the years before the French Revolution in 1789, it was understood that a nation’s political power projection was based on its military strength and its military strength was a reflection of its economy. Without a strong economy, a nation would not be in the position to sustain a military force and it would not be capable of projecting its political power. The role of economics and the economic ability of nations to wage wars altered the nature of warfare and limited war instead of making it more common as a feature of European politics.

From 1648 to 1789, wars were economically limited in scope and duration because armies were expensive; soldiers cost money to train and even more money to replace; weapons were getting technologically advanced and there was always new technology which was making weapons obsolete. There was a constant need to modernize and this modernization was putting an unbearable burden on national economies. The wars of this period were limited affairs, fought over a piece of land or a political dispute. The economic costs of war were so high that it was considered foolish to risk one’s army in a battle, because the cost of replacing the lost soldiers and the lost equipment was too prohibitive. The reason, which limited wars was that no monarch of Europe could afford to see his army destroyed and as a result, the wars were more about preserving the cohesion of the armies than blooding them in battles.