The Art of Renaissance Warfare by Stephen Turnbull

Author:Stephen Turnbull
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HISTORY / Military / Ancient
ISBN: 9781526713773
Publisher: Frontline Books
Published: 2018-01-29T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 9

Knights Old and New

The constant theme throughout this book is one of change, as the ideals, the behaviour, the environment and the weaponry of war become transformed in response to advances in tactics, armaments and defensive warfare. Previous chapters have traced such ‘revolutionary’ changes in terms of castle design, galley warfare and the pike square. We will now examine the mounted warrior of the Renaissance in terms of his evolution from knight to cavalryman.

Knighthood, wrote the great military historian Hans Delbrück, was based on ‘qualified individual warriors’, whereas cavalry consisted of ‘tactical bodies composed of horsemen’.1 This need for a sharper distinction between types of mounted men arose from the use of light cavalry. For example, du Bellay, in his Discipline Militaire of 1548, identified four types of mounted men: knights (gendarmes or men-at-arms), light horsemen (chevaux legers), stradiots (estradiots or ginetes) and harquebusiers.2

This fundamental shift will be analysed by reference to campaigns and battles, but we will also take a more personal look at the knight himself by examining the lives of three individuals whose chivalric careers cover almost the whole time span of this book. The names of the trio are: Pierre Tenaille, known as Bayard, who was born in about 1476 and died the year before Pavia; Blaise de Monluc, who fought at Bicocca and Pavia; and François de la Noue, who died in 1591. Their overlapping careers illustrate in microcosm the great changes in warfare that were taking place all around them. Not the least of these were developments in firearms, which affected all of them in a very personal way. Bayard and la Noue were both shot dead by arquebus balls, while de Monluc was severely wounded by one in the battle that ended his active military career.

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