Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)Eltis's book offers an excellent survey of the technological and tactical changes in military science that occured in the sixteenth century. It does not detail specific battles, but it references many battles from all across Europe that illustrate the points discussed. It also includes a fascinating chapter explaining why this military revolution did not reach England until well after it had swept the continent.
The prose is occassionaly verbose and he often repeats his conclusions, but these faults only strengthen the read for the layperson. The first chapter is primarily a philosphical arguement against the less thorough theories of two previous historians, but even disregarding that chapter, this book is a key work on the transition of military matters from Renaissence to modern.
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Previous writers on military change in the early-modern period have defined a "military revolution" focused on the 17th or even early 18th-centuries. This work suggests that key developments in training, organization, tactics and siege warfare occurred in the 16th century and that, taken together, these innovations constitute a military revolution, changing the face of war.English writers, in their anxiety to spur their compatriots to adopt the new methods, produced some of the most useful manuals of 16th-century Europe. These, together with Italian, Spanish, French and German texts form the main basis of this study, allowing the ideas of contemporaries to be set alongside accounts of actual military conditions in explaining one of the turning points of world military development.
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