Weapons and Warfare in Renaissance Europe: Gunpowder, Technology, and Tactics.

Bert S. Hall, (Johns Hopkins Studies in the History of Technology.) Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. xiii + 300 pp. $29.95. ISBN: 0-8018-5531-4.

Recently the idea of a "military revolution" in early modern times, first advanced by Michael Roberts and then restated in a different form by Geoffrey Parker, has come under attack. Aside from criticism of the arguments advanced by those scholars, arguments have been presented for greater continuity between late medieval warfare and the military developments of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The author of this volume has focused on one aspect of this supposed transformation, "the gunpowder revolution." Here too the argument for continuity and evolutionary change is made in a study which combines in-depth examination of technical issues with analyses of battles and campaigns. Moreover, both heavy guns and small arms are studied, although little attention is given to parallel developments in maritime ordinance.

Hall does not slight the traditional arms, edged weapons and bows, which were used in the later Middle Ages. Cavalry and infantry armed with pikes or like weapons are given their due. Nor are old and facile judgements about the displacement of heavy cavalry by missile-firing troops repeated. Gunpowder weapons are shown as having been integrated into the existing means of warfare. These weapons being hard to move and slow to fire, they were most effectively used either in sieges or on the tactical defensive until more rapid means of loading and firing were developed. Hall rightly emphasizes the way in which any gain for the offense, for example, in the use of siege artillery, was counterbalanced by improvements in the defensive capacities of combatants, for example, in the development of new forms of fortification. On the whole, however, he argues that gunpowder ended up favoring the defense.

Hall is in his element when he discusses the technological issues influencing, but not dictating, the use of gunpowder weapons. The development of sufficient supplies of saltpeter and the corning of gunpowder are studied in detail. So are the ballistic properties of medieval and early-modern firearms. If the book lags anywhere it is in paying sufficient attention to the means of creating and maintaining an artillery train of the sort which served the Valois kings of France so well in the last stages of the Hundred Years' War.

Only in the last chapter, when addressing the larger question of "military revolution," does Hall offer a counter-thesis on military change. The picture painted is one of qualitative improvements in military technology rather than dramatic shifts caused by any one innovation. War is presented not as the father of new states but as their tool, eating up their taxes in the pursuit of political goals and soaking up many of the poor. That there would be long-term financial repercussions for these states is not denied, but they are shown as reaping short-term benefits from having large armies able to hold or to seize disputed border fortresses. The development of gunpowder weaponry in the West, according to Hall, points not toward the cataclysmic wars of recent centuries but toward the wars of the Old Regime, in which sieges remained reliable tools of statecraft, although they were conducted by larger armies with better guns.

THOMAM M. IZBICKI Johns Hopkins University