A History of War in 100 Battles

by Richard Overy

  This portrait by the Portuguese-born artist Alonso Sanchez Coello (1531–88) depicts the governor of the Habsburg Netherlands, Don John of Austria, as a decorated military commander. Only a few years after this painting, in 1578, John died aged thirty-one of ‘camp fever’ (probably typhus) while campaigning in Belgium.

  There were risks for Don John in seeking battle. To lose would again open the West to Ottoman conquest, but the autumn weather was treacherous, holding his fleet in harbour on 5 October after its arrival in Greece, with the wind against them. The fog, however, helped to shield the Christian fleet’s approach. On the morning of Sunday, 7 October, Mass was said aboard the whole Christian fleet. As if in answer to Christian prayers, the wind suddenly changed direction, swelling their sails but forcing the enemy fleet to row. Then silently the whole body of Christian ships moved into the strait, suddenly sighting the vast Ottoman fleet, arranged in its traditional long crescent so that it could envelop and destroy the enemy. The right wing was commanded by the Turkish admiral Mehmet Scirocco, the left by a notorious corsair, the savage and disfigured Italian renegade, Uluch Ali (Occhiali).

  Don John had drawn up a battle plan that deviated from the conventional approach. He divided his forces into three contingents, with the galleasses out in front, and a reserve force behind. This gave the whole Christian line more flexibility, as long as it held. The northern wing was commanded by the Venetian Marcantonio Quirini, the southern by Gianandrea Doria from Genoa. Don John and his flagship Real led the centre. In the morning sunlight the two fleets slowly crept towards each other, the Turks noisy with coarse shouts and music, the Christian vessels menacingly quiet. Suddenly as the Turkish galleys approached, the galleasses opened up. The deadly salvos quickly broke up the Turkish line while the fire from the massed musketeers wrought havoc among the lightly dressed Ottoman soldiers. Then the other Christian galleys began their cannonade; freed from the oblique angle required with a large fixed prow, their guns sank galley after galley of the enemy.

  A sixteenth-century painting depicts the Battle of Lepanto at the height of the action on 7 October 1571. The Christian Holy League built heavy galleasses – large ships with extra cannon – which engaged the Ottoman fleet first and caused wide destruction.

  Don John soon found himself engaged with the flagship of his enemy, the substantial Sultana, flying a large pennant dedicated to Allah, whose name was embroidered in gold 28,900 times. The two ships crashed together and Don John’s crew swept aboard. In the savage fighting Admiral Ali was shot through the forehead. A galley slave, one of the thousands released by Don John to fight the Muslim enemy, hacked off Ali’s head and displayed it on a pike. The Sultana was seized along with a remarkable hoard of gold. The flag of Allah was hauled down and later taken to Spain as a trophy. On the left wing, the Venetians had at first faced encirclement, but superior gunfire and the help of Christian galley slaves, who slipped their shackles to attack their enslavers, turned the tide. Scirocco was killed and his head, too, displayed on a lance to his demoralized followers. The battle in the centre and north swung firmly towards Don John. In the south, Uluch Ali tricked the Genoese admiral by sailing south as a feint. As the Christian line stretched, it lost contact with the centre and Uluch Ali swiftly took his light corsair galliots through the gap and attacked ships in the rear belonging to the Knights of Malta. He seized their flagship and made off westwards trying to avoid the rest of the Christian fleet, which was now free to engage him. He had to abandon the flagship prize and in the end only eight of his ships managed to escape. The rest were sunk or beached. By 4 p.m., a historic victory had been won. Uluch Ali fled back to Constantinople where he reported the disaster to an incandescent Selim.

  Accounts of the battle convey its messy and sanguinary character, the sea full of the dead or dying, the decks awash with blood, freed galley slaves murdering their Ottoman tormentors with zeal. Christian losses are put at between 7,000 and 8,000, with a further 4,000 dying of their wounds. Ottoman dead are estimated to be at least 26,000, with 3,500 taken captive and 12,000 slaves freed. The vast Ottoman fleet was reduced to around 40 ships; of the rest, 127 were captured and 84 sunk or burnt. The Holy League lost perhaps 33 vessels, but these could be more than replaced with those they had captured. The gunships had done their work. The Ottoman menace had not entirely receded, but it was held at bay for seventy years and Christians in Europe could get back to the familiar task of fighting each other.

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  No. 37 THE SPANISH ARMADA

  1–9 August 1588

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  The defeat of the Spanish Armada in the late summer of 1588 has remained one of the most famous dates in English history. It is always called the Spanish Armada, as if that were the name of the battle. The Armada was in reality the Spanish word for the huge fleet of ships, now thought to have numbered 130, which set out from the port of Corunna in July 1588 to invade England. The critical battle in a week of naval skirmishes came on 8 August off the French coast at Gravelines, when the English fleet inflicted what turned out to be a decisive defeat on the only major attempt to invade England throughout all the centuries since 1066.

  Invasion of England was the brainchild of King Philip II of Spain (nicknamed ‘Philip the Prudent’), who had briefly been consort to the Tudor queen Mary I before her death in 1558. He was sincerely committed to eradicating Protestantism as a force in Europe, and the English, who supported the Protestant rebellion in the Spanish Netherlands and preyed incessantly on the rich Spanish trade with Latin America, came to be seen as the main threat to Spanish Catholic interests in Europe. The Armada was gathered together to bring pressure to bear on the English to overthrow Queen Elizabeth and to halt English intervention in the Low Countries. This was to be achieved either by the mere threat of invasion or, if the large Spanish army in the Netherlands commanded by the Duke of Parma could be ferried across the English Channel, by actual invasion and occupation for as long as it took to get the English to agree to Philip’s terms.

  The Armada began to take shape in 1587 as a stream of ships and supplies came from all over Europe, at great expense, to provide the necessary resources. The original commander, the Marquis of Santa Cruz, died before he could take the fleet out, to be succeeded by the Andalusian nobleman, the Duke of Medina Sidonia. He was a reluctant commander, partly because he could see that the fleet, for all its size, was probably not equal to the task. The supplies wasted or rotted as the months passed and many of the ships were suitable only for Mediterranean sailing, not for the harsher Atlantic. The whole enterprise depended on good communication with the Duke of Parma, who had a personal antipathy to the new fleet commander, but above all on finding an effective deep-water port where the Armada could anchor while the Spanish army was prepared, embarked and convoyed across the Channel.

  The ships finally left Corunna on 21 July 1588 in a better state than they had been, but still divided between a core of royal galleons designed for ocean combat, and a host of smaller vessels that were not. There were also four galleasses, which had proved their worth at Lepanto a decade earlier, but were difficult to manoeuvre on the open sea with their great banks of oars. Against them was ranged the English fleet commanded by Lord Howard of Effingham, the Lord High Admiral. There were at least 230 ships available, though they were divided into detachments to safeguard the coast from Cornwall to Essex.

  The English had similar problems securing manpower and supplies from a parsimonious monarch, but also important advantages. The English ships were far more manoeuvrable than those of the enemy, being for the most part narrower and longer, without top-heavy castles fore and aft. They were manned by sailors with a great deal of experience, much of it in privateering against Spanish ships. The guns were designed for rapid reloading, and though generally smaller than many of the Spanish guns, they could be fired more regularly. Nor were English decks cluttered with soldiers and their equipment, unlike the Armada, which carried 24,000 men on board. These soldiers had no exper
ience of sea-fighting and although they could prime Spanish cannon for a first volley, they had no training in moving and reloading them. The Armada had been hastily put together with cannon from across Europe, which meant problems in finding the right ammunition. Spanish shot was cast quickly in 1587–88 and contained many impurities, making it prone to break up either in the cannon or as it was fired.

  The English did not fully understand the technical advantages they held, but these advantages proved decisive. On 1 August the Armada, keeping very close formation so that the more vulnerable ships could be protected by the larger galleons and galleasses, was met by a portion of the English fleet under Howard off Lizard Point in Cornwall. It was then that Sir Francis Drake, half-admiral, half-pirate, was supposed to have finished his game of bowls before attending to the Spanish. The story is almost certainly apocryphal, but Drake (‘El Draque’ to the Spanish) was a formidable opponent, greedy for riches, ruthless and an excellent seaman. The English fleet was nevertheless cautious in its approach because the Armada looked worryingly large. Throughout the days that followed, the English were generally helped by a favourable wind, which allowed their vessels to remain behind the Armada, threatening its rearguard. What the English had to avoid was a close encounter, because the Spanish ships were used to grappling and boarding an enemy, not to long-range gun battles. Further skirmishes occurred off Portland Bill and the Isle of Wight, but as the Armada continued to its uncertain rendezvous with Parma, the English held back. ‘We pluck their feathers by little and little,’ wrote Howard.

  The commander of the English fleet in 1588, Lord Charles Howard of Effingham, later the First Earl of Nottingham (1536–1624), is shown here in a Victorian engraving of 1838.

  This painting depicts the fireships sent by the English fleet against the Spanish Armada anchored off Calais on the night of 7–8 August 1588. Although no Spanish ships were ignited, they were forced to cut their anchors and the fleet’s tight formation was broken up.

  Medina Sidonia and his commanders were confused by the English tactics and anxious about what would happen when they arrived off the Flanders shoals and sandbanks to try to shield Parma’s embarking army. There had been no reply to any of Medina Sidonia’s letters to Parma, but when news finally arrived on 7 August, it was evident that the Spanish army of the Netherlands was in no state to stage a cross-Channel invasion. The Spanish fleet anchored off Calais, unable to find a port and worried by the risk of beaching on the shallows. On the night of 7–8 August, the English prepared eight fire ships from among their older vessels and sent them towards the anchored Spanish. The captains immediately cut their cables and anchors and dispersed into the night. Not one Spanish vessel was ignited but the tight formation was at last broken up. At 7 a.m. on 8 August, the English fleet, now organized into four squadrons, closed with the scattered enemy north of Gravelines. At some point Howard and his admirals had realized that the Spanish were not prepared for a gun duel. He ordered attack in line astern, a tactic used thereafter up to Trafalgar and beyond. They brought their ships within 100 metres (330 feet) of the Spanish and pounded them with shot that holed many below the waterline. There was little response, though Drake’s Revenge was badly damaged as he engaged Medina Sidonia’s flagship. The battle raged all day until the Spanish fleet began a full retreat into the North Sea, abandoning any attempt to collect the invasion army.

  The scale of the victory took some time to understand, since only two galleons had been sunk, though many were holed. Some 600 Spaniards were killed compared with a mere 20 on the English side, and the loss of not a single English vessel. The Armada was doomed, for its large number of weaker Mediterranean ships proved no match for the weather on the long trip home around Scotland and Ireland. Only 66 ships returned, most of them damaged, and 20,000 out of the 30,000 on board perished – killed, starved, drowned or dead from disease. The English sailors were little better off, short of food and racked with epidemics. Many were left to die in the street on their return to port and Howard was forced to pay half their wages from his own pocket. But soon the result was understood, and on 30 August the City of London, with as much pomp and circumstance as it could manage, celebrated victory at St Paul’s Cathedral. Medina Sidonia arrived back in Spain seriously ill and was never forgiven. King Philip blamed his sins and those of his people for the fact that God had abandoned the Armada to its fate, but in reality the outcome rested on small but significant material differences between the two navies.

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  No. 38 BATTLE OF BREITENFELD

  7 September 1631

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  Historians are generally agreed that some kind of military revolution took place in the conduct of war during the seventeenth century and one name that stands out above all others in implementing it is Gustav Adolf II, king of Sweden, best known in the Latin form as Gustavus Adolphus. At the Battle of Breitenfeld, north of Leipzig in Saxony, his army had the opportunity to show what his reforms could achieve in one of the major battles of the Thirty Years’ War, a conflict that raked its way back and forth across the German lands from the 1620s to the 1640s. So effective were his tactical innovations that by the end of five hours of exhausting fighting against well over 30,000 troops of the Habsburg Holy Roman Emperor, Ferdinand II, only half of his men had actually seen combat.

  This outcome was possible because Gustavus Adolphus had implemented a number of major changes in the way Swedish forces were conscripted, trained and deployed in the decade before Breitenfeld. The reforms were certainly not entirely original, owing much to the sixteenth-century Dutch military reformer, Prince Maurice of Orange. Gustavus Adolphus took ideas where he could and made them into a system. His Articles of War, read out in 1621, placed great emphasis on military discipline to make sure his army fought as a unit and avoided behaviour likely to undermine that unity. Swearing, drunkenness and desertion were severely punished – indeed, there were forty military offences for which the punishment was death. His men were trained in musketry and the use of the pike, while cavalry was restored as a truly offensive arm, working in combination with the foot soldiers. His most significant innovation came in the way forces were to be laid out on the battlefield. Gustavus rejected the idea of a phalanx in favour of a long line of brigade-strength units, supported on the wings by cavalry and each with its own mobile artillery. To fight effectively in defence and on the offensive, his army had to drill hard to ensure that movement on the battlefield did not turn into a confusion of men and horses. So important was regular rehearsal thought to be that on the very eve of Breitenfeld the men were ordered to practise their manoeuvres.

  The Swedish army was also a conscript army, to which all Swedish communities were required to supply a given number of conscripts. This was essential to supply enough men from a small population to match Gustavus’s large ambitions, though it was eventually to leave some villages almost entirely devoid of men. It was this army, made up predominantly of peasant recruits, that intervened in the Thirty Years War to safeguard Sweden’s interests in the Baltic trade and to protect the coastal territory along what are now the Baltic States. As a Protestant state, Sweden was opposed to the imperialistic ambitions of the Habsburg emperor and his Catholic allies, though this did not stop Catholic France from giving him a substantial five-year subsidy to keep the emperor busy fighting in the east. In 1630, Gustavus landed in northern Germany with an army of perhaps 50,000 men. He could find few Protestant princes willing to support him, except for the Duke of Brandenburg, but when the Imperial army, led by the Austrian commander Johann Tserclaes von Tilly, undertook an invasion of Saxony, the Swedish army moved south to support the Saxon elector, Johann Georg, whose efforts to remain neutral in the war had finally broken down. Tilly’s forces began the systematic spoliation of Saxon territory in late August 1631. On 2 September, the elector signed an alliance with Gustavus and three days later their two armies, 24,000 veteran Swedes and 18,000 inexperienced Saxon levies, met up some miles north of the Saxon city of
Leipzig, which Tilly had just captured.

  Gustavus Adolphus II, the king of Sweden, rides into the Battle of Stralsund in August 1628. The battle marked the start of the successful Swedish campaign against the forces of the Holy Roman Emperor, Ferdinand II. The painting, by Jacob van der Heyden (1573–1645), dates from 1630.

  A seventeenth-century plan of the Battle of Breitenfeld shows the Swedish army, aided by Saxon forces, inflicting a decisive defeat on the armies of the Austrian general Johannes von Tilly. Swedish success was due to innovations in training and tactics introduced by Gustavus Adolphus II.

  The Imperial army moved north from Leipzig and on 7 September (17 September in the Gregorian calendar) drew up on a field of Tilly’s choosing near the village of Breitenfeld. The site was mainly flat with shallow undulations, ideal for the Imperial army to deploy the 23,000 infantry in the conventional tercio formation (thick squares of pikemen and musketeers, thirty men deep) and also ideal for the 12,000 cavalry under the command of Count Gottfried zu Pappenheim, drawn up on either wing. The Swedes and Saxons arrayed themselves in two independent formations facing the enemy. The Saxons on the left were organized in a thick pyramid of pikemen and musketeers, with no reserve, but supported on each side by horsemen, a deployment similar to the larger Imperial force. The Swedish line was unconventional. Their units were spread out in a long line in brigade formation, with a second line of reserves behind. Each brigade was supported by its own mobile battery of nine or twelve guns with the heavy artillery in front. The lines of musketeers were six deep, the pikemen five deep. On each wing was a mix of cavalry and musketeers, with gaps between the infantry to allow the cavalry room to charge through and to retire when the charge was done. Each time they returned, the musketeers let off the next fusillade, giving the enemy no breathing space. The object was to use the arms in combination, increasing both defensive and offensive power.