The European military heritage reaches far back into the dim recesses of history. Many centuries before the birth of Christ, organized armies under formal discipline and employing definite systems of battlefield tactics appeared in the empires of the Near East, rivaling in numbers and in the scope of their conflicts anything that was to appear in the Western World before the nineteenth century. In the fourth century B.C., Alexander the Great of Macedonia brought all these empires and dominions, in fact most of civilization known to the Western World, under his suzerainty in a series of rapid military conquests. In so doing, he carried to the highest point of development the art of war as it was practiced in the Greek city-states. He utilized the phalanxa solid mass infantry formation using pikes as its cutting edge-as the Greeks had long done, but put far greater emphasis on heavy cavalry and contingents of archers and slingers to increase the maneuverability of his armies. The Romans eventually fell heir to most of Alexander's empire and extended their conquests westward and northward to include present-day Spain, France, Belgium, and England, bringing these areas within the pale of Roman civilization. The Romans built on the achievements of Alexander and brought the art of war to its zenith in the ancient world. They perfected, in the legion, a tactical military unit of great maneuverability comparable in some respects to the modern division, performed remarkable feats of military engineering, and developed elaborate systems of fortification and siegecraft. For all their achievements, the Romans made no real progress in the development of new weapons, and Roman military institutions, like Roman political organization and economy, underwent progressive decay after the second century A.D. The Roman Empire in the west was succeeded first by a congeries of barbarian kingdoms and eventually by a highly decentralized political system known as feudalism, under which a multitude of warring nobles exercised authority over local areas of varying size. The art of war underwent profound change with the armored knight on horseback succeeding to the battlefield supremacy that, under the Greeks and Romans, had belonged to disciplined formations of infantry. Society in the Middle Ages was highly stratified, and a rigid division existed between the knightly or ruling noble class and the great mass of peasants who tilled the soil, most of them as serfs bound to the nobles' estates. Warfare became for the, most part a monopoly of the ruling classes, for only men of substance could afford horse and armor. Every knight owed a certain number of days of military service to his lord each year in a hierarchical or pyramid arrangement, the king at the apex and the great mass of lesser knights forming the base. But lords who were strong enough defied their superiors. Fortified castles with moat and drawbridge, built on commanding points of terrain, furnished sanctuaries where lesser lords with inferior forces could defy more powerful opponents. Wherever freemen were found, nonetheless, in town or countryside, they continued to bear arms on occasion as infantry, often as despised adjuncts to armies composed of heavy cavalry. This yeoman class was always stronger in England than on the Continent, except in such remote or mountainous areas as Switzerland and the Scandinavian countries. Even after the Norman conquest had brought feudal institutions to England, the ancient Saxon tradition of the fyrd that required every freeman between sixteen and sixty to bear arms in defense of his country remained alive. In 1181 the English King Henry II declared in his Assize of Arms that every freeman should keep and "bear these arms in his [the king's] service according to his order and in allegiance to the lord King and his realm." Vestiges of feudal institutions survived well into the twentieth century, nowhere more prominently than in European military organizations where the old feudal nobility long dominated the officer ranks and continued its traditions of honor and chivalry. At the other end of the scale, the militia system, so prominent in British and American history, owed much to medieval precedents, for the Saxon fyrd and Henry II's Assize of Arms underlay the militia tradition transplanted from England to America. Between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries the feudal order as the basic political organization of European society gave way gradually to new national states under the dynastic rule of royal families. The growth of towns with their merchant and artisan classes and the consequent appearance of a money economy enabled ambitious kings to levy taxes and borrow money to raise and support military forces and to unify and rule their kingdoms. The Protestant Reformation shattered the religious unity of Western Christendom. A long series of bloody wars ensued in which the bitter animosity of Protestant and Catholic was inextricably mixed with dynastic and national ambition in provoking conflict. Changes in military organization, weapons, and tactics went hand in hand with political, social, and economic change. In the later Middle Ages formations of disciplined infantry using longbow, crossbow, pike, and halberd (a long-handled ax with a pike head at the end), reasserted their superiority on the battlefield. The introduction of gunpowder in the fourteenth century began a process of technological change in weapons that was to enhance that superiority; more immediately, gunpowder was used in crude artillery to batter down the walls of medieval castles. The age of the armored knight and the castle gave way to an age of mercenary infantry. In the religious and dynastic wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as mercenary armies came more and more to be national armies, various weapons employing gunpowder gradually replaced pike and halberd as the standard infantry weapons, and armor gradually disappeared from the bodies of both infantry and cavalry soldiers. At first musketeers were employed alongside pikemen in square formations, the pikemen protecting the musketeers while they reloaded. As the wheel lock musket succeeded the harquebus as a shoulder arm and the flintlock in turn supplanted the wheel lock, armies came to rely less and less on the pike, more and more on firepower delivered by muskets. By 1700, with the invention of a socket bayonet that could be fitted onto the end of the flintlock musket without plugging the barrel, the pike disappeared entirely and along with it the helmet and body armor that had primarily been designed for protection against pikes. Meanwhile, commanders learned to maneuver large bodies of troops on the battlefield and to employ infantry, cavalry, and artillery in combination. National armies composed of professional soldiers came once again to resemble the imperial forces that had served Alexander the Great and the Roman emperors. In the destructive Thirty Years' War in Germany (1618-48), religious passions finally ran their course. European warfare would henceforth be a matter of clashes of dynastic and national rather than local or religious interests. After the chaos and destruction that had attended the religious wars, rulers and ruling classes in all countries sought stability and order. Beginning with the wars of Louis XIV of France in 1660, dynastic rivalries were to be fought out by professional armies within the framework of an established order which, in its essentials, none sought to disturb. The eighteenth century European military system that resulted constituted an important part of the world environment in the period the United States came into being. Back to Table of Contents Issue 1 Back to US Army Military History List of Issues Back to MagWeb Magazine List © Copyright 2005 by Coalition Web, Inc. This article appears in MagWeb.com (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. 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