Pike and shot
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Pike and shot is an historical method of infantry combat, and also refers to an era of European warfare generally considered to cover the period from the Italian Wars to the evolution of the bayonet in the late seventeenth century. The infantry formations of the period were a mix of pikemen and "shot" (arquebusiers or musketeers).
Each troop type had a function to fulfill, and supported the other in battle, the shot dealing out casualties at a distance, the pikemen protecting the shot from enemy cavalry. Adoption of this mixed formation permitted the widespread use of firearms -- as long as firearms were short-ranged, slow-firing and cumbersome, they would need the protection of the pikeman to survive on the open battlefield.
Pike and shot tactics evolved continually as firearm technology became more advanced, until the flintlock musket and the bayonet cured many of the traditional shortcomings of the "shot" toward the end of the seventeenth century, at which point the pike and shot formation was phased out.
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[edit] Origin
By the end of the fifteenth century, those late-medieval troop types that had proven most successful in the Hundred Years War and Burgundian Wars dominated warfare, especially the heavily armoured gendarme (a professional version of the medieval knight), the Swiss and Landsknecht pikeman, and the emerging artillery corps of heavy cannons, which were rapidly improving in technological sophistication. The French army of the Valois kings was particularly formidable due to its combination of all of these elements.
This French dominance of warfare, combined with political ambitions of the Valois kings, presented a daunting challenge to those nations who would oppose French ambitions, particularly in Italy. When, in 1495 at the Battle of Seminara, the hitherto-successful Spanish army was trounced opposing the French invasion of Naples by a French army composed of armoured gendarme cavalry and Swiss mercenary infantry, the chastened Spanish undertook a reorganization of their army under the great captain Gonzalo de Córdoba.
Realizing that he could not match the sheer offensive power of the French gendarmes and Swiss pikes, de Córdoba decided to integrate the shooting power of firearms, an emerging technology at the time, with the defensive strength of the pike, and to employ them in a mutually-supporting formation, preferably in a strong defensive position.
At first, this mixed infantry formation was referred to as a Colunella ("colonelcy"), and was commanded by a colonel. It interspersed formations of men in close order armed with the pike and looser formations armed with the firearm, initially the arquebus. The arquebusiers could shoot down their foes, and could then run to the nearby pikemen for shelter if enemy cavalry or pikes grew near. This was especially necessary because the firearms of the early sixteenth century were inaccurate, took a very long time to load, but did not have a very long range, meaning the shooters often were able to get off only a few shots before the enemy were upon them.
This new tactic resulted in triumph for the Spanish and de Córdoba's Colunellas at the Battle of Cerignola, one of the great victories of the Italian Wars, in which the heavily-outnumbered Spanish pike-and-shot forces, in a strong defensive position, crushed the attacking gendarmes and Swiss mercenaries of the French army.
[edit] The sixteenth century
[edit] Further development of Spanish/Imperial pike and shot formations
The Spanish Colunellas continued to show valuable flexibility as the Great Italian Wars progressed, and the Spanish string of battlefield successes continued. The Colunellas were eventually replaced, in the 1530s, by the much larger Tercio, a huge pike-and-shot formation with an on-paper strength of roughly 3,000 men.
As this formation matured in usage by the Spanish during the sixteenth century, it generally took on the appearance of a “bastioned square” – that is, a large square with smaller square “bastions” at each corner. The large square in the center was made up of the pikemen, 56 files across and 22 ranks deep. The outer edges of the central pike square were lined with a thin rank of arquebusiers totaling 250 men. At each corner of this great pike square were the smaller squares of arquebusiers, called mangas, each 240 men strong. Finally, two groups in open order, each of 90 men and armed with the longer musket, were placed in front of, and to the sides of, the arquebusiers.
Attrition due to sickness, combat and desertion often led to the Tercios being far smaller in practice than the numbers above suggest, but the roughly 1:1 ratio of pikemen to shooters was generally maintained. Tercio-like formations were used by other powers, chiefly the German areas of the Habsburg Empire, and these adopted a similar formation, although usually of fewer men – a theoretical number of 1-2,000 men being more common, although even these numbers could be reduced by the conditions already mentioned.
The Tercio is often seen by modern eyes as extremely cumbersome and wasteful of men, many of the soldiers being positioned so that they could not bring their weapons to bear against the enemy. However, in its day it had its benefits. It offered great protection against cavalry – still the dominant fast-attack arm on the battlefield – and was extremely sturdy and difficult to defeat. It was very hard to isolate or outflank and destroy the Tercio by maneuver due to its great depth and distribution of firepower to all sides (as opposed to the maximization of combat power in the frontal arc adopted by later formations). Finally, its depth meant that it could run over more shallow formations in a close assault – that is, should the cumbersome Tercio manage to strike the enemy line.
Armies using the Tercio generally intended to field them in brigades of at least three, with one Tercio in the front and two behind, the rearward formations echeloned off on either side so that all three resembled a stepped pyramid. This entire formation would be flanked by cavalry. The musketeers, and those arquebusiers whose shooting was not blocked by friendly forces, were supposed to keep up a continuous fire by rotation. This led to a fairly slow rate of advance, estimated by modern writers at roughly 60 meters a minute.
[edit] The French fail to keep pace
The great rivals of the Spanish/Habsburg Empire, the Kings of France, had access to a smaller and poorly-organized force of pike and shot. The French military establishment showed considerably less interest in shot as a native troop type than did the Spanish until the end of the sixteenth century, and continued to prefer close combat arms, particularly heavy cavalry, as the decisive force in their armies until the French Wars of Religion. This despite the desire of King Francis I to establish his own pike and shot contingents after the disaster of Pavia, in which he was defeated and captured. Francis had declared the establishment of the French “Legions” in the 1530s, large infantry formations of 6,000 men which were roughly composed of 60% pikemen, 30% arquebusiers and 10% halberdiers. These legions were raised regionally, one in each of Normandy, Languedoc, Champagne and Picardy. Detachments of around 1,000 men could be sent off to separate duty, but in practice the Legions were initially little more than an ill-disciplined rabble and a failure as a battlefield force, and as such were soon relegated to garrison duty until they matured in the seventeenth century.
In practice, pike and shot formations that the French used on the sixteenth-century battlefield were often of an ad hoc nature, the large blocks of Swiss mercenary, Landsknecht, or, to a lesser extent, French pikemen being supported at times by bands of mercenary adventurer shot, largely Gascons and Italians. (The Swiss and Landsknechts also had their own small contingents of arquebusiers, usually comprising not more than 10-20% of their total force.) The French were also late to adopt the musket, the first reference to their use being at the end of the 1560s -- twenty years after its use by the Spanish, Germans and Italians.
This was essentially the condition of the French Royal infantry throughout the French Wars of Religion that occupied most of the latter sixteenth century, and when their Huguenot foes had to improvise a native infantry force, it was largely made up of arquebusiers with few if any pikes (other than the large blocks of Landsknechts they sometimes hired), rendering formal pike and shot tactics impossible.
In the one great battle fought in the sixteenth century between the French and their Imperial rivals after the Spanish adoption of the Tercio, the Battle of Ceresole, the Imperial pike and shot formations shot down attacking French gendarmes, defending themselves with the pike when surviving heavy cavalry got close. Although the battle was ultimately lost by the Spanish, it demonstrated the self-sufficiency of the mixed pike and shot formations, something sorely lacking in the French armies of the day.
[edit] Dutch reforms
Foremost amongst the enemies of the Spanish Habsburg empire in the late 16th century were the Seventeen Provinces of the Netherlands (often retroactively known as the "Dutch" due to the eventual establishment of the Dutch Republic in 1648), who fought a long war of independence from Spanish control starting in 1566. After soldiering on for years with a polyglot army of foreign-supplied troops and mercenaries, the Dutch took steps to reform their armies starting in 1590 under their captain-general, Maurice of Nassau, who had read ancient military treatises extensively.
In addition to standardizing drill, weapon caliber, pike length, and so on, Maurice turned to his readings in classical military doctrine to establish smaller, more flexible combat formations than the ponderous regiments and tercios which then presided over open battle. Each Dutch battalion was to be 550 men strong, identical to the size of the Roman legionary cohort described by Vegetius. Although inspired by the Romans, Maurice's soldiers carried the weapons of their day -- 250 were pikemen and the remaining 300 were arquebusiers and musketeers, 60 of the shot serving as a skirmish screen in front of the battalion, the rest forming up in two equal bodies, one on either side of the pikemen. Two or more of these battalions were to form the regiment, which was thus theoretically 1,100 men or stronger, but unlike the tercio, the regiment had the battalions as fully functional sub-units, each of mixed pike and shot which could, and generally did, operate independently, or could support each other closely.
These battalions were fielded much less deep than the infantry squares of the Spanish, the pikemen being generally described as five to ten ranks deep, the shot eight to twelve ranks. In this way, fewer musketeers were left inactive in the rear of the formation, as was the case with tercios which deployed in a bastioned-square.
Maurice called for a deployment of his battalions in three offset lines, each line giving the one in front of it close support by means of a checkerboard formation, another similarity to Roman military systems, in this case the Legion's Quincunx deployment.
In the end, Maurice's armies depended primarily on defensive siege warfare to wear down the Spanish attempting to wrest control of the heavily-fortified towns of the Seventeen Provinces, rather than risking the loss of all through open battle. On the rare occasion that open battle occurred, this reformed army, as many reformed armies have done in the past, behaved variably, running cravenly from the Spanish tercios one day, fighting those same tercios only a few days later, at the Battle of Nieuwpoort, and crushing them. Maurice's reforms are more famous for the effect they had on others -- taken up and perfected, and would be put to the test on the battlefields of the seventeenth century.
[edit] The early to mid-seventeenth century
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[edit] Later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries
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[edit] References
- Arfaioli, Maurizio. The Black Bands of Giovanni: Infantry and Diplomacy During the Italian Wars (1526–1528). Pisa: Pisa University Press, Edizioni Plus, 2005. ISBN 88-8492-231-3.
- Baumgartner, Frederic J. The French Reluctance to Adopt Firearms Technology in the Early Modern Period, in The Heirs of Archimedes: Science and the Art of War Through the Age of Enlightenment, eds Brett D. Steele and Tamera Dorland. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2005.
- Baumgartner, Frederic J. France in the Sixteenth Century. New York, New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995.
- Oman, Charles. A History of the Art of War in the Sixteenth Century. London: Methuen & Co., 1937.
- Jorgensen, Christer (et al). Fighting Techniques of the Early Modern World: Equipment, Combat Skills, and Tactics. New York, New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2006.
- Taylor, Frederick Lewis. The Art of War in Italy, 1494–1529. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1973. ISBN 0-8371-5025-6.
[edit] See also
- The Pike & Shot Society, a society devoted to study of the period
