Mind-Munitions

Renaissance Warfare 91
When the French king Charles VIII invaded Italy in 1494,
thereby launching the Italian wars, which spread across Europe
through the Hapsburg-Valois rivalry and lasted until 1559, his
army consisted not just of Frenchmen but also mercenaries from
Switzerland, Scotland, and even Italy itself. The best mercenary
troops came from countries that were torn apart by internal chaos,
men who had no sense of ‘national’ pride but who were accustomed
to violence and were thus prepared to sell their skills to the
highest bidder. Money was the major motivation in such men, and
their employers directed their propaganda towards them around
the promise of financial reward. It didn’t always work. When the
risks outweighed the reward, mercenaries demonstrated the
fickleness of their loyalty – as in 1525 when Swiss troops deserted
the French before the battle of Pavia because they were not paid.
Better to rely on the more predictable loyalty of men recruited
from the emerging nation-states, men with at least a modicum of
what we would now call nationalism or patriotism. However,
despite Machiavelli’s call for a citizen militia, there remained a
clear distinction between the solider whose job was to fight and
the civilian whose duty was to finance and support his efforts.
As for our veteran’s question, a variety of methods were used to
prevent ‘disorder and confusion’ – in other words, to sustain morale.
Standards and ensigns were allocated to the new professional
captains, around which smaller units of men would fight. As the
military treatise, Le Rozier des Guerres, put it, ‘there is nothing so
profitable for achieving a victory than obeying the orders of the
ensigns’. Quartermasters ensured better supplies, although their
very existence would suggest that morale was a big problem,
especially when it came to billeting. Uniforms were introduced to
increase the sense of communal identity, and to serve as a
reassurance to soldiers that they would not be hacked to death by
their own side in the confusion of battle (although uniforms also
served to identify soldiers to the enemy as well). With so many men
in the field, new methods of issuing instructions were required. The
aural therefore replaced the visual (especially as vision was now
obscured by gunpowder smoke) with the increased use of drummers,
fifers, and trumpeters – apparently an innovation of the German
and Swiss mercenaries. As one sixteenth-century source stated:
The noise of all the … instruments serves as a signal and warning to the
soldiers to strike camp, to advance and to withdraw; and to give them