The Habsburg Bid For Mastery
France was an early leader in applying the new military technology in Europe, Spain and Portugal led the way it exporting it abroad.
By the mid sixteenth century the Portuguese has established forts and trading stations along the coasts of Africa, India, China and the East Indies and South America and the Spanish had carved out a large empire in the New World.
These outposts, which return great wealth to the Iberian Peninsula, would not have been possible without some vital military innovations.
The Portuguese and Spanish reached the Americas, Asia and Africa by utilizing oceangoing, sail-driven galleons; they never could have made it in the oar-driven galleys of old.
Once they arrived, steel blades, crossbows cannons and arquebuses allowed the Iberians to make short work of native opposition.
Even after half a millennium, the feats of the conquistadors defy belief. Hernan Cortes conquered the Aztec empire with eight hundred men and eighty horses.
Francisco Pizarro defeated the Inca Empire with just 180 men and eighty horses. Native allies and the spread of European disease helped a great deal, but it was the Spaniards’ military technology that made the difference – otherwise the Aztec and Inca Empires would have been overthrown long before their native enemies.
The Spanish infantry proved almost as effective on the battlefields of Europe. In 1525 they inflicted a crushing defeat on the French at the Battle of Pavia (near Milan), ensuring that the Habsburg, not the Valois, would dominate Italy.
The head of the House of Habsburg was an Emperor Charles V. He had no conscious design to dominate Europe but his web of inheritances and acquisitions was pushing him in the same directions as those latter-day conquerors.
His domains encompass Spain, Germany Austria, Alsace, France-Comte, Bohemia, Hungary, the Netherlands, much of Italy, and the Americas.
Like his father, King Philip II saw himself as “God’s standard bearer,” defender of Christendom against “infidels” without and “heretics” within.
The battle pitting Reformation vs. Counter-Reformation was only one of many that convulsed Europe during the early modern era.
Religious rivalries melded with dynastic ones to produce a particularly bellicose age.
Between 1480 and 1700 England was involved in 29 wars, France in 34, Spain in 36 and the Holy Roman Empire in 25.
As their names imply – the Eighty Years’ War, the The Thirty Years’ War – many of these struggles were quite protracted.
All this fighting also led to the development and deployment of new tools of wars, especially cannons, muskets and galleons.
By the mid-sixteenth the Habsburg had seized for the French the early advantage in utilizing these innovations, but their lead and with it their empire – would be challenged by increasingly assertive competitors such as England, Holland and Sweden.
The ensuing battle for control of Europe and eventually the entire world would be decided in substantial measure by mastery of the tactics and technology of the Gunpowder Age.
The Habsburg Bid For Mastery
