Military organisation in Picardy during the Habsburg–Valois wars

Abstract

The Habsburg–Valois Wars outside Italy have failed to attract the attention of modern historians, in contrast to the formidable analysis brought to bear on the Religious Wars of the later sixteenth century or the Thirty Years War. It may be surmised that this results from the suspicion that conflicts generated essentially by dynastic rivalry are more trivial than those with some kind of ideological or economic impulse behind them. The Habsburg–Valois conflict, much of it inconclusive, might easily have attracted Veronica Wedgwood's verdict on the Thirty Years War as ‘the supreme example of meaningless conflict’. Yet it would be difficult to imagine the genesis of modern warfare without the lessons taught in tactics and fortification during the first half of the sixteenth century; nor would the instruments of Absolute Monarchy have been so substantially developed. For some regions of western Europe, this was the most devastating experience for centuries. Picardy was, during the first half of the sixteenth century, the most consistently fought-over region of France, and its history in that period is inseparable from war. After the generation of uneasy peace that followed the definitive restoration of royal government in the later fifteenth century, the forty-seven years from 1521 to 1559 saw twenty-eight years of war, all of which involved fighting of some kind and fifteen of which witnessed the mounting of major campaigns. The king appeared in person at the head of his armies in 1521, 1524, 1537, 1543, 1549, 1553, 1554 and 1558.