The Renaissance, 1450–1530

Part of the charm of Renaissance writers is their firm conviction that they were living in a ‘golden age’. Their world was bigger and better than anything in the past and, they sometimes reflected, the heroes of antiquity would have been miserable failures as Renaissance men, even as Renaissance soldiers. ‘We must confesse’, wrote Sir Roger Williams, an English general of the later sixteenth century, ‘Alexander, Caesar, Scipio, and Haniball, to be the worthiest and famoust warriers that euer were; notwithstanding, assure your selfe, …they would neuer haue…conquered Countries so easilie, had they been fortified as Germanie, France, and the Low Countries, with others, haue been since their daies.’ We may smile at this characteristic Renaissance hyperbole, but in the field of warfare at least it was fully justified: the military realities of the sixteenth century were indeed far more complex and far more daunting than those of the Classical (or any previous) Age.

European warfare was transformed between 1450 and 1530 by a number of basic changes. First came the improved fortifications of which Sir Roger Williams wrote, linked to the introduction of powerful new artillery. An entirely new type of defensive fortification appeared in Italy in the later fifteenth century: the trace italienne, a circuit of low, thick walls punctuated by quadrilateral bastions. The development of large siege-cannon – made of cast-iron from the 1380s and of bronze from the 1420s – rendered the high, thin walls of the Middle Ages quite indefensible.