Early Modern Warfare

This most recent edition of the bibliography contains almost 21,200 titles in English (64%) and French (36%), with an introductory section on historiography. It deals with every aspect of Italian history and culture from the Late Renaissance to the French Revolution.

People have built walls for thousands of years to protect cities, to divide cities and along the borders of polities.  This paper examines this process to place modern walls in a historical context and to ask in what ways is modern wall building similar and different from earlier walls. For most of human history, people primarily built walls as military technology. The European invention of cannon in the 16th century radically changed global wall construction. The further development of artillery in the late 19th century as well as tanks and aircraft in the 20th essentially made walls obsolete as military technology.  Within cities, walls defined and elaborated ethnic and religious differences but this custom also declined in the 19th century to be revived in the second half of the 20th century.  Many walled cites such as Carcassonne in France and long walls such as the Great Wall of China and Hadrian’s Wall in England are important parts of global heritage.  Modern walls largely lack the military emphasis of earlier walls but retain the power to define, assert, protect, and ultimately polarize radical, ethnic, religious and national identities.

This communication presents the intervention of Alonso of Aragon, archbishop of Zaragoza (ca. 1469–1520), in the conquest of Navarre. He was the viceroy of Aragon and its commander in chief, because of that he was the main character of the military intervention. Specially, he surrendered the city of Tudela, the last stand of the loyal side to the king John III Albret. It pretends to explain the negotiations, how were the troops recruited and how was the campaign financed.

La presente comunicación pretende abordar la actuación que tuvo el arzobispo de Zaragoza don Alonso de Aragón (ca. 1469–1520) en la conquista de Navarra. Como lugarteniente general de Aragón y capitán general de sus tropas, tuvo una especial importancia en la rendición del sur del reino navarro, especialmente la ciudad de Tudela, última villa de importancia en someterse a Fernando el Católico. Se presta atención a las tropas reclutadas y las conversaciones mantenidas, pero también a cómo se financió la campaña.

There is a lot of misinformation circulating about this battle. This is largely based on retrospective accounts of the day, and some particularly partisan accounts.  This section challenges these through a forensic study of eye-witness accounts of the battle. In so doing it completely revises our understanding of the battle.

Summary in English
This article explores the relationship between
Danish irregular combatants and the Army
Headquarters during the Scanian War (1676–
1679). Since the space is limited I chose one,
seemingly quite unimportant, episode and
studied the way it was represented in respectively Swedish and Danish sources at the
time. In 1683 the Scanian nobleman Mogens
Swave wrote a petition to the Swedish
authorities in which he mentioned that he
had been abducted by snapphanar during the
(Scanian) war. The snapphanar took him to
an officer and then he was kept in Danish 011
custody for the rest of the war. At the time the
expression ‘snapphanar’ was paramount to
‘bandits’ in Swedish. Danish military reports
of the same event reveal that Swave was in
fact arrested on the orders of the Danish commander-in-chief Friderich von Arenstorff and
that the snapphanar were troopers from the
King’s Friskytter Corps under Captain Simon
Andersön. The army officer that Swave was
brought to was Lieutenant Pieter Sten from
the 1st Zealand National Regiment, who
worked as a liaisons officer between the
regular army and the irregular troops. In
many Swedish sources (though not in
Swave’s letter) he too is classified as a snapphane. Obviously Swave had chosen to use a
terminology that he thought would increase
his chances of obtaining the tax-exemption
he had applied for. A perusal of the sources
from the Scanian War and shortly afterwards
puts in evidence that it was part of the general Swedish discourse at the time to ascribe
many of the unpleasant events that had taken
place during the war to the snapphanar and
that those who sought to obtain the good-will
of the authorities often adhered to this kind
of rhetoric. However, what was defined as a
snapphane in the Swedish sources, generally
went under various different definitions in
the Danish sources: in this case the Friskytter
Corps that were comparatively small units of
horsemen that moved swiftly across the land
and were experts at reconnaissance, skirmishing and interrupting enemy communications. As a structure they were similar to the
irregular troops used in many European
countries at the time, not the least to the
Croats and Panduren that assisted the Imperial troops in the fight against the Turks and
the Danes in the same kind of operations as
the friskytter. Other troops that engaged in
the same sort of combat were those that
Pieter Sten belonged to: regular army units
of modest dimensions that worked with special operations in no man’s land or behind
enemy lines. These regular units were called
‘partheyen’. A ‘parthey’ could also stand for
an entire operation in which regular troops,
friskytter, Croats, local sheriffs and perhaps
also unregistered local guerrillas participated. In Swedish sources sometimes all
participant enemy units in this kind of
‘partheyen’ were classified as snapphanar,
except perhaps the Croats. As in the case of
Swave’s letter it consequently became impossible to understand what kind of military
or non-military action had actually taken
place.

„Forms of War 1600-1815“ is the title of the Bavarian Army Museum’s latest permanent exhibition, opened in 2019 and housed in the New  Castle of Ingolstadt. With exhibits from the museum‘s own collection and some important loans, it illustrates the forms of warlike violence in the early modern period. Focal points are the fighting in the major battles on open fields, the siege and defence of fortresses, and the so-called “small war”, which placed a heavy burden on the countryside and the population in the vicinity of the major conflicts.
The book is an introduction to the subject and also provides some information about the redesign of the museum rooms. All the exhibited items are documented in text and pictures, most of them are published here for the first time.

The ‘Nine Years War’ in Ireland saw violence and upheaval which brought the authority of the English crown to the point of collapse, but also resulted in the completion of the Tudor conquest and the eradication of native Irish laws and social order. This thesis examines the conduct and impact of the Nine Years War in the context of military transformations occurring in continental Europe. The effects of the modernising influences of the ‘military revolution’ on the native Irish military are explored, and also the reciprocal development and response of the forces of the English crown. This is achieved by studying the war at strategic, operational and tactical levels, the role of combat, the methodology and equipment used and development of doctrine. Furthermore the increased intensity of war precipitated higher levels of brutality and civilian victimisation. Therefore this study examines the role and extent of atrocity and aggression against civilians in Ireland and compares this with the experience of war in contemporary Europe.
Key issues engaged with are the strategy behind both Irish and English campaigns, the degree to which the war can be considered a guerrilla war, the use of fortifications by the Irish, and the fatal weaknesses in the forces raised by O’Neill and his confederates. In addition non-combat characteristics of the war are examined such as the native economy, manufacturing, the command and control of military forces, and Irish military logistics. Detailed examination of the course and key moments of the war provides significant insight into attitudes in early modern Ireland with regards to modernisation, innovation and the social relationships between the native Irish, and the Old English and New English.

The subject of this source edition are two military registers of the army of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania from the period of the Polish-Muscovite War (1609–1618). The first document, kept in the division of the II Warsaw Archive of the Radziwills of the Central Archives of Historical Records in Warsaw, was probably prepared before the 1615 Sejm session. It is a list of cavalry and infantry units deployed in Livonia, in frontier castles of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, in Smolensk, and in a camp near Orsha. The second document being published makes part of a manuscript number 321/2 from the fond no. 971 at the National Library of Russia in Sankt Peterburg. The register was probably an addendum to a letter of Great Lithuanian Hetman Jan Karol Chodkiewicz to Field Lithuanian Hetman Krzysztof II Radziwiłł written on 3 June 1615. It is a corrected and supplemented register of the Lithuanian troops, the draft version of which was presented by Hetman Chodkiewicz at the end of March or early April to King Sigismund III Vasa in Warsaw. The document contains information not only about the composition and number of the Lithuanian troops in the spring of 1615, but also about the number of planned recruitments and related problems of the size reduction of the army. The two registers are mutually complementary and together with a preserved correspondence make a valuable contribution to the research into the organisation and number of the Lithuanian army in the first half of the seventeenth century.

En Dauphiné, les guerres d'Italie se rappellent aux souvenirs de tous par la personne du chevalier Bayard mais bien d'autres Dauphinois ont été appelés à participer aux guerres de la couronne au delà des monts: Francs archers, légionnaires, élus, fouagers. Tous démontrent une pratique militaire de frontière de plus en plus permanente pour soutenir l'effort de guerre, participant ainsi à inscrire davantage le fait militaire à l'échelle locale et provinciale.

T HE siege and battle of Kinsale have signified the end of the Gaelic world for the historiography of Ireland and Spain 1 . After the defeat of the Earls of Tyrone and Tyrconnell and their Spanish allies, Irish society beyond the English Pale or enclave around Dublin, began to change dramatically. This trauma was not only experienced by the Gaelic Irish, but also by those Irish of Hiberno-Norman and Old English origins. The old customs and the Brehon law were proscribed and English Common Law was imposed on the island kingdom, at least in theory 2 .

This article is from a popular trimestral magazine that focusses on Scanian history and culture so it is not a scholarly article. However, it still contains some new findings on the workings of popular resistance, militia and paramilitary troops during the Scanian War. Traditionally it is often assumed that southern Scania was either little affected by the war of 1676-1679 or else not at all, but there is plenty of evidence that the fertile south was an active war theatre throughout the war. The former misconceptions date from times when all attention was centred on major battles, sieges and campaigns, whereas the 'small war' that happened in parlallel with the 'big war' was ignored as a minor circumstance. In more recent scholarship, these matters have taken on a new light and historians like Beatrice Heuser and George Satterfield have  brought back the 'small war' on the scene of history - not the least because it was a kind of warfare that went on all year round, while the rest of the combat units enjoyed their winter rest. This was also the case in Scania, and the southeast was of particular interest because of its fertile fields, ample opportunities for storage of food and hay, and because of the transport route to the besieged city of Malmö. Another important point that I make in this article, is that the local 'snapphanar/snaphaner' rebels were in part official troops, recruited by a chief forester on account of the military authorities (in this case represented by Admiral Cornelis Tromp). The conflict between these troops and the Swedish troops that were stationed in the area caused incessant clashes during the Scanian War.

Indice / Content: 1. La teoría en los prólogos. 2.  Con toda verdad: testigos, documentos, archivos. 3. Cumplir con la poesía. 4. Entender la guerra: épica y artes de la milicia. 5. A leer una épica no se acomoda el vulgo. 6. Faltando quien las escriba.

„Formen des Krieges 1600-1815“ ist der Titel der 2019 neu eröffneten Räume des Bayerischen Armeemuseums im Neuen Schloss Ingolstadt. Mit Stücken der Sammlung und einigen bedeutenden Leihgaben zeigen sie die Formen kriegerischer Gewalt in der Frühen Neuzeit. Schwerpunkte sind die Kämpfe auf freiem Feld in den großen Schlachten, die Belagerung und Verteidigung der Festungen und der so genannte Kleine Krieg, der im Umkreis der großen Auseinandersetzungen Land und Leute schwer belastete.
Das Buch bietet eine Einführung in das Thema und informiert über die Neugestaltung der Museumsräume. Alle ausgestellten Stücke sind in Bild und Text dokumentiert, zum großen Teil werden sie hier erstmals publiziert.

The Nine Years War has often been portrayed as a no-holds-barred conflict in which brutality was the norm. The orgy or bloodshed and cataclysmic famine in Ulster which brought the war to its close helped cement this image. That Queen Elizabeth and her advisors saw this as a rebellion and not a war demonstrated that, for the English, the actions of the Hugh O’Neill and his allies placed them beyond the prevailing customs of jus in bello. This would have allowed any and all actions to recover control of Ireland. However, close examination of the details of the war shows that restraint was commonplace from its outset. This paper will look at the limitations on inter-personal violence against both soldiers and civilians and how these could change according to circumstance. It is well-known that the forces of the crown and the Irish lords could be callous, but there also many instances here surrenders were accepted and prisoners spared. Whenever outrages did occur, often they can be explained for reasons other than cultural intolerance or bigotry; personal animosity, logistical weakness, operational expediency and frustrations caused by the irregular characteristics of the conflict could all influence either side’s proclivity for taking prisoners. However the war was not fought in a moral vacuum as there were frequent examples of trust and expectations of good-faith between belligerents. While brutal the war was not an untrammelled descent into barbarism, thought the decidedly bloody conclusion has tended to obscure this.

Quisiera agradecer en primer lugar la ayuda y el apoyo prestado por el profesor Bernardo García y la Fundación Carlos de Amberes, sin las cuales esta investigación no hubiera sido posible, muchas gracias de todo corazón. Al profesor Fernando Andrés le doy las gracias por todos los desvelos que ha tenido por mí en la Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. A los profesores Antonio Álvarez-Ossorio, Declan Downey, Alicia Esteban Estríngana, Enrique García Hernán y Brian Jackson, director del John Hume Institute for Global Irish Studies, University College of Dublin, les agradezco su constante aliento y auxilio. También a los doctores Benjamin Hazard y Antonio Rodríguez.

Where can we find today those copies that we know once accompanied a specific individual or group on a journey in early modern times? What manuscript notes or other miscellaneous textual fragments might we find in these volumes? Could these notes allow us to capture, in their own contemporaneity, the personal reflections and emotional states of individuals on particular journeys or in struggles for survival? What could such details tell us about their relationship to writing, to the natural world around them, to time, or to the supernatural? And how have these manuscripts in motion, some of which eventually found their way into the hands of non-Ottomans, contribute to the accumulation of Islamic manuscripts in early modern European collections?

This article sets out to address these questions by spotlighting the contents of a curious manuscript of clear Ottoman provenance currently housed in the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) in Paris. The book includes several separate short tracts and textual fragments, mostly dealing with calendric computation and different divination techniques, penned down by manifestly different hands, some not fully literate in Arabic script. The nature of texts found in the manuscript and some of the curious notes on certain folios of the book (left by an Ottoman sailor taking part in military ventures and directly addressing his fellow seafarers on board) offer a unique window into capturing, with striking immediacy, the sentiments of a particular Ottoman individual and his respective community in motion that had resort to supernatural forces and other tools of divination in their fight for survival under dire circumstances.

Oleksii Sokyrko
Structural reforms of Hetman Kyrylo Rozumovs’kii and the beginning of the end of the Cossack Hetmanate
The article is devoted to a reconsideration of the reforms of the last Hetman of the Left Bank Ukraine Kyrylo Rozumovs’kii (1750–1764). In historiography, he has the image of the last hetman-statesman, who sought to strengthen the main institutions of Cossack autonomy. Analysis of the main ones — judicial, military and bureaucratic — shows that they were the result of the initiatives of the top Cossack Officials (starshyna), which in the middle of the XVIII century became the main political class of the country. The Hetman acted mainly as a lobbyist for senior interests before the imperial government, hoping in return to receive a hereditary hetmanship of its family. The most consistent and well-thought-out of these measures was judicial reform, which laid a solid foundation for the Cossack Official’s subsequent political projects, the main purpose of which was to establish his political dominance in Little Russia. Its essence was to restore the sectoral system of justice
with a clear hierarchy of courts. The reform clearly separated the courts of seniority from the rest of the underprivileged commoners. Attempts to build their own system of seniority and service rank, as well as to equate them with Russian ranks, were less successful. Changes in the army were aimed at streamlining the military duties of Cossacks and attempts to instill elements of regular military organization: establishment of staff, uniforms, weapons, equipment, symbols, training etc. These changes, however, were cosmetic in nature, not fundamentally changing the estate status of the Cossack army. But, even the partial implementation of these transformations contradicted the integration strategy of the Russian Empire, which led first to the liquidation of the institution of the Hetmanate, and later to the autonomous system of the whole etmanate.

The two battles-Preveza and Lepanto-are recorded in European historical memory in very different ways. In European historical memory, Lepanto has become the symbol of Christian victory over the invincible Ottoman Empire, even though it did not result in any significant tactical or strategic advantage or territorial change. The battle of Preveza, on the other hand, faded into oblivion. What similarities and differences can be drawn between the two battles? The historical context of the two battles provides an opportunity to draw parallels. Neither battle can be considered decisive in terms of military history. On 28 September 1538 and 7 October 1571, both battles saw two large enemy fleets clash. One of the most striking differences from the Holy League of 1538 was that in 1571 the Danubian Habsburg Monarchy did not join. In addition to the tactical and combat differences and analogies, we cannot ignore some technical developments: there are significant differences between the Christian galleys fighting in 1538 and 1571.

Español: Tras setenta años de paz, Venecia se vio nuevamente atrapada en un conflicto con la Sublime Puerta por el reino de Candía (1645-1669). No obstante, el llamamiento de la Serenísima a las potencias europeas en pos de su apoyo no tuvo los efectos deseados hasta que, a finales de la década de los cincuenta, tuvieron lugar los ataques otomanos en Hungría y Transilvania. Unos hechos que permitieron a la Santa Sede llevar a cabo una maniobra para recuperar el liderazgo del bando católico a través de una fórmula habitual: la Liga Santa.
En las siguientes páginas analizaremos el papel del Papado, el Imperio, Francia, España y Venecia en el congreso que tuvo lugar en la corte pontificia entre 1661 y 1662 para alcanzar la confederación católica. Unas negociaciones que no llegaron a buen puerto a tenor de los intereses contrapuestos de las distintas partes, y, muy especialmente, los de Felipe IV y Luis XIV.
Palabras clave: Liga Santa, plenipotencias, Santa Sede, embajadores y política exterior.
English: After seventy years of peace, Venice was caught once again in a conflict against the Great Gateway for the kingdom of Candia (1645-1669). However, the Serenissima's appeal to the European powers for their support did not have the desired impact until the Ottoman attacks in Hungary and Transylvania in the late 1650s. Events that allowed the Holy See to carry out a maneuver to recover the Catholic leadership through a common formula: The Holy League.
In the following pages we will analyze the role of the Papacy, the Empire, France, Spain and Venice in the congress that took place at the papal court between 1661 and 1662 to achieve the Catholic confederation. Negotiations that did not come to fruition in view of the conflicting goals of the different parties involved, and, especially, those of Philip IV and Louis XIV.
Keywords: Holy League, credentials, Holy See, ambassadors and foreign policy.

Battle of Orsha (Belarus) fought  on September 8, 1514 was one of the largest pitched battles in series of wars between Muscovy and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and a brilliant victory of Lithuanian-Polish forces. However, the exact place of the battle is one of its most controversial issues. The paper examines all the existing versions and offers another one.

Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba, Gran Capitán de los ejércitos españoles, destacó por mantener la fidelidad a la misión, por la aplicación deliberada de la violencia a gran escala como resorte para mover voluntades propias o del enemigo. Impuso en Europa la forma de guerrear característica en Granada, de ardides, escaramuzas y emboscadas.
Procuró que los combatientes armados de distinta manera  se complementaran en sus capacidades, formando  agrupamientos tácticos, base de los Tercios, dominadores de los campos de batalla europeosdurante siglo y medio.
Sus enseñanzas sobre el aprovechamiento del terreno pasaron a convertirse en algo básico de la praxis militar; llevó a Italia la sorpresa para multiplicar la eficacia de sus fuerzas, y con ello devolvió a la guerra europea uno de sus principios fundamentales, mereciendo por ello un puesto entre los grandes jefes militares de la Historia.

Hybrid war is today the most fashionable concept in relation wiht armed conflicts but, within, we can find a lot of variable units o cells. The memes and fake news are cheaper weapons than missiles and sometimes show themselves as more effective ones.

El reinado de Felipe III desde el punto de vista historiográfico ha sido considerado como pacífico, un tiempo en el que existió una Pax hispanica similar a la que vivió Roma durante varios siglos 1 . Fueron unos años en los que el monarca y su valido hicieron posible que se alcanzara la concordia con Inglaterra o las Provincias Unidas 2 . Sin embargo, y como pasó con el Imperio romano 3 , la quietud y la paz se tenían que mantener mediante una hegemonía militar incontestable. La ausencia de esta o, simplemente, una falta de voluntad a la hora de imponerla, llevarían irrevocablemente al conflicto, ya que otras potencias ansiarían ponerla en jaque para beneficio propio. Esto fue lo que ocurrió cuando Carlos Manuel I, duque de Saboya, decidió invadir el Monferrato, estado que pertenecía legalmente a Fernando Gonzaga, heredero de dicho ducado y del de Mantua. La obsesión del Saboya por agrandar sus estados provocó una conflagración que desgarró el norte de Italia durante cuatro años -los combates se extendieron desde 1614 hasta 1617-, no siendo una crisis regional sino europea y un claro preámbulo de la guerra de los Treinta Años. * Este trabajo se ha realizado en el marco del proyecto I+D Excelencia: «Conformar la Monarquía Hispánica. Cultura política y prácticas dinásticas en los siglos xvi y xvii» (HAR2016-76214-P), financiado por el Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad. 1 B. J. García García, La Pax Hispanica. Política exterior del duque de Lerma, Leuven, Leuven University Press, 1996. 2 Para diferentes estudios y perspectivas sobre la época, véase B. J. García García (ed.), Tiempo de paces. La Pax Hispanica y la Tregua de los Doce Años (1609-2009), Madrid, Fundación Carlos de Amberes, 2009; y B. J. García García, M. Herrero Sánchez y A. Hugon (eds.), El arte de la prudencia. La Tregua de los Doce Años en la Europa de los Pacificadores, Madrid, Fundación Carlos de Amberes, 2012. 3 A. Goldsworthy, Pax Romana. Guerra, paz y conquista en el mundo romano, Madrid, La Esfera de los Libros, 2017.

At the turn of the 17th and 18th centuries, few men had their destiny as closely linked to the events of the Levant as Francesco Grimani (1659-1733). This paper focuses on his supervision of the numerous fortification projects for the Venetian Regno di Morea.

In full war against the Ottomans, the Austrians tried to take out of the war and even occupy the two Romanian countries, part of the Ottoman Empire. While Wallachia quickly succumbed to the attack, Moldavia proved to be a tough enemy. With good information, a determined Phanariote ruler and Tatar allies, Moldavia managed to defend itself bravely in 1717 and even mount an attack into Transylvania the same year.

Abdullah bin Ibrahim nicknamed Üsküdarî was a participant in the military campaign of grand vizier Mustafa Pasha Köprülü against Serbia in 1690. In his diary, he described one of the largest destructions in the long history of the Belgrade fortress. In October 1690 during the Ottoman bombardment of Belgrade, which was then in hands of the Habsburg Monarchy, one grenade struck a large powder storeroom and caused an explosion that destroyed the medieval castle of despot Stefan Lazarević. The castle, built in the early 15th century, was situated in the present-day area between the Victor monument and the Ottoman fountain at Defterdar’s Gate, where today only a miniature scale model reveals its former appearance. Üsküdarî’s dramatic first-hand description of the explosion and of the slaughter of defenders in the Danube port tells not only about the human and material costs but also provides information on the location of some of the city’s buildings and neighbourhoods.