The Military Revolution, 1560-1660: an Inaugural Lecture Delivered before the Queen's University of Belfast

The armies which carried through the military revolution—or upon which that revolution impinged—were nearly all mercenary armies. The tactics of Gustav Adolf postulated a vastly improved fire-discipline, and long practice in the combination of arms. The new emphasis on training and drill seemed to contemporaries to reinforce their already established convictions about the best way to recruit an army. A mercenary army cared not at all if the war were prolonged, or fought far from home; it economized the state's own manpower, and hence its wealth; the system of recruiting through captains relieved the government of a good deal of administrative work. Military writers such as Machiavelli and Lazarus von Schwendi had urged the superiority of the citizen army, with many a backward glance at the military virtues of republican Rome. The difference was that they became standing armies too. And this change arose mainly from the obvious need to make them less burdensome to the state.