Military Revolution

Quo Vadis?

The Military Revolution in Eastern Europe

First circle, from the middle of the 15th to the beginning of the 17th centuries

by VLADIMIR SHIROGOROV

The concept of the military revolution is a go-to research paradigm for studies on the Early Modern Period.

However, it lacks an accepted definition or established theoretical framework.

These omissions allow scholars to choose from a wide range of interpretations, from presenting the military revolution as a reportage from battlefields, or a sociological “ideal type” to complete negation.

The current essay is committed to disentangle the web of the military revolution’s history and historiography.

It tracks warfare determinants during the Early Modern transformation of East-European nations and compares the socio-political impact of their respective military changes.

The essay also proposes a periodization of the military revolution’s epoch in conjunction to the concept of the fiscal-military state. 

Studies on the military revolution in Eastern Europe started in the 1990s when the demise of the communists’ ideological dictate with its harsh Marxism allowed East-European historians to use the concept.

It was also the time when Western historians and sociologists started to discuss the concept more globally. The military revolution, which had been confined within West-European history as a hypothetical description of one of its epochs, the Early Modern Period, became the research method.

It was reasonable that it was brought on board to study the same period of Western Europe’s close neighbours, the Ottoman Empire and Eastern Europe.

While in Ottoman studies the concept of the military revolution has had a spectacular development, in the studies of Eastern Europe it has been frustrated.

The reason is not just the difference between numerous nations of Eastern Europe and the difficulty to generalize and compare the diverse evidence of its past.

The great variety of contemporary nations’ academic schools, barriers of languages and ideologies are hindering the making of the models similar to the widely accepted abstractions that the concept of the military revolution proposes for Western Europe and the Ottoman Empire, and that are its main research instruments.

The studies on military revolution in Eastern Europe fell to national and scholarly groups that often produce non-corresponding narratives.

Their divergence is fuelled by the disorganization of the military revolution concept itself.

Jan Glete’s confidential

Three principal issues of studies on the military revolution are still being clarified, the subject of the study, its chronological period, and its objectives.

Most scholars focus their attention on the proliferation of firearms or more widely on the change in weaponry, tactics, organization, and mobilization of armies that coincided chronologically with the mastering of firearms for use in warfighting. It is a fertile and extensive field, however, as a connoisseur of East-European history, Robert I. Frost notes that the founder of the concept Michael Roberts’ “claim for a [military] revolution lay not in the importance of particular tactical changes […] but in their impact on governments and states in seventeenth-century Europe.” Roberts proposed “not […] a military revolution at all, but a political revolution occasioned by military changes.” Roberts’ concept calls for research on the “military developments,” as Frost cites Roberts, that “were the agents […] of constitutional and social change.” Frost’s radical view does not devalue the studies of the military novelties of the Early Modern Period but claims them to be irrelevant to the military revolution concept if they do not establish the causation of military affairs for society and its political regime. Frost is David before Goliath, – it is not a job of the most studies on the military revolution.

The chronology is another glaring lacuna of the military revolution debates. The concept offered by Michael Roberts was misinterpreted as a call to look for military changes; their authority over society and political regimes was assumed and regarded as requiring neither confirmation nor specification.

The historiographic community rushed to warfare studies and the swelling Early Modern Period turned out to be overpacked with radical military innovations from the 13th to the 18th centuries. Geoffrey Parker, the outstanding promoter of Roberts’ concept, although unintended, opened this historiographical abyss with his famous book The Military Revolution. Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500—1800, first published in 1988.

Parker’s attention to the fighting details and the significance that he assigned to the bastion fortress of the 15th century and the size of the armies in the 18th century spread the military revolution over all of the Early Modern Period with swells back to the Middle Ages and forward to Modernity. One of the most influential ideologists of the look in the rear-view mirror, Clifford Rogers, a Hundred Years’ War scholar, and Andrew Krepinevich, a war futurologist and US Vietnam War researcher, when referring to each other proposed a toolbox of ten “revolutions in military affairs (RMAs)” (Rogers) or “military revolutions” (Krepinevich).

Rogers’ and Krepinevich’s respective military histories look like a wave of military revolutions or RMAs from the antediluvian past to the fantasy future. At least four of them fall squarely within the swollen Early Modern Period, the Infantry Revolution (the 14th century), the Artillery Revolution (the 15th century), the Fortress Revolution (the 16th century), and the Military Revolution (the 17th century). Rogers explains that while the three initial revolutions are only RMAs, the last one is the true military revolution because it caused the emergence of the “centrally governed nation-states equipped with a large standing army” and “the beginnings of the modern European map.”

Krepinevich does not go this far, as his military revolution remains a fighting style, “the Swedish military system.” Rogers’ important remark was not widely noted and Krepinevich’s chronology still dominates the studies. Roberts’ root chronology of the military revolution as the extraordinary determinant of socio-political development across a specific short period of history, the first decades of the 17th century, ceases to exist.

The third issue regarding the studies on the military revolution concerns their objectives. Finding the sharp military changes that influenced warfighting is one thing and establishing the military phenomena that determined the transformation of the society is another completely.

Parker’s abovementioned seminal book highlights a spectacular variety of military innovations in weaponry, tactics and organization of force over the globe with a short paragraph on the Concept in his Afterword. Parker simply concurs that “a consequential conceptual difficulty lies in the link between armies, navies, on the one hand, and “state formation” on the other” and lets the matter remain loose.

His example invites historians to collect the “military revolutions” packed with the military changes of unfound bond to the socio-political transformation. According to Robert Frost, the discussion on the military revolution is predominantly engaged with matters of warfare while “the precise relationship between military, administrative and political change” remains “rather vague.”

After historians mostly abstained from explaining the socio-political transformation by military changes, the sociologists advanced. Charles Tilly, a scholar of social action, proposed his concept in the title Coercion, Capital and European States. His coercion includes military matters.

Tilly, although headlining one of his paragraphs War drives states formation and transformation, avoids establishing the exemplary causation between the particular military changes and definite socio-political structures. It is the reason why his period of the transformation of states appears stretching similar to the military revolutions of Krepinevich.

Jan Glete, a strong on-case historian, adopted a concept of “the fiscal-military state” and applied it to Spain, the Dutch Republic and Sweden, the latter being his field of expertise. For Glete, the “major military transformation” of the 16th and 17th centuries was “increasingly based on centralized structures” that were “a decisive step in the formation of the modern state.” “The changes were simultaneous and their interconnections are the background to the term ‘fiscal-military state.'”

Glete sees the military transformation as the “precondition or driving force for state formation, but it is equally possible that it was new centralized states that achieved the major parts of the military transformation.” “Alternatively, both types of change may have been the result of new form of interaction and aggregation of political interests (new institutions) within the states.” Glete establishes the exact causation between warfare and fiscal-military consolidation.

He first, presents the story of the premature fiscal-military state in Spain, where the “elite groups […] shared or dominated in the control of the state.” Second, he describes the Dutch expansionist fiscal-military state with the effective “interests aggregation.” And third, he shows the Swedish absolutist fiscal-military state with “strong central power.”

Fig 1 The ruthless and adamant innovators.

The pioneer of East-European infantry warfare and the model of absolutist monarch Albrecht von Brandenburg stays far right in the row of the Teutonic High Masters’ statues, designed by Rudolf Siemering in 1872 in the court of the castle Marienburg (Malbork), Prussia (Northern Poland)

Photo Der Spreekicker, CC Wikimedia Commons

All of Glete’s national models of the fiscal-military state represent his vision of the political regime’s transformation, sharp, mighty and concise in time, that was driven by the equally revolutionary military changes in weaponry, tactic and organization of armies. These military changes were concentrated in standing professional forces, firearms and infantry, pike-and-shot tactic and salvo fire, artillery fleet and struggle over sea domination. They were associated with certain social groups and political factions which ran the fiscal-military transformation of the states.

Glete’s creation of the fiscal-military state is not evolutionary accruing of the fiscal-military structures but revolutionary act of their forceful implementation. Spain, Dutch Republic and Sweden, Glete’s three creatures of the military revolution are the extreme edges of the triangle within which all other particular cases fit. Chester S.L. Dunning, a scholar of Muscovite history of the 16th – 17th centuries, notes that “the term fiscal-military state quickly… caught fire – due primarily to the weakness of “absolutism” as an explanatory framework.” However, as Brian L.

Davies, an expert of the East-European Early Modern warfare, remarks, “the advantage of “fiscal-military state” is its own vagueness” and it “is at the same its disadvantage.” Similar to the military revolution, scholars started to search for and find the species of the fiscal-military state over all of the Early Modern Time. Jan Glete’s rigorous “aggregation” of the revolutionary military, its adherent socio-political groups and state transformation is mostly lost. In establishing the distinctive staples between the military changes and socio-political transformation, Jan Glete remains almost alone like the voice of one that crieth.

Jeremy Black’s cycle

In his frequently cited book A Military Revolution? Military Change and European Society, 1550 – 1800, Jeremy Black proposed an idea that strangely remained almost unnoted by anyone besides Jan Glete. The reason for this obscurity is that Black’s idea consists of elements that are rather scattered over its pages.

Black did not continue his research on this idea, although it might become central to our understanding of the military revolution as the complex process of the tightly bound technical and tactical military changes and socio-political transformation in the Early Modern Period. It is the idea of the integral cycle of the three stages of the military revolution, a clutch of three circles.

In parallel to Black, Glete also proposes three phases of “the rise of the European fiscal-military states […] in terms of the ability of the states to enforce domestic peace and to mobilize resources for war…” Glete’s periodization of the military revolution is special for each case: it grows from the inside out. Black’s chronology is different, it is a bird’s eye view of the national cases and it imposes the generalization on them.

The first of Black’s circles is the introduction of combat worthy firearms, and tactics of their employment in “the late-fifteenth and early-sixteenth centuries.” One of the substantial features of this period was the wide diversity of the firearms’ employment patterns and socio-political answers to the mutation of armies. This diversity existed not only between the armies of the different states but also inside the states, and Black accentuates it.

Glete defines this period as the phase of “co-operation within the traditional states, 1480 – 1560.” It was the time when “increased domestic peace was achieved by traditional [Late Medieval?] political means” both in the “national and territorial” states of Western Europe and Ottoman, Muscovite, Mughal “conglomerates […] further east.” It was also “the formative period of the European tax or fiscal state.” Due partly to the adoption of firearms “the increased role of efficient field armies and permanent navies placed rulers in a more central and influential position.”

The second of the transformational circles is one that Black initially denies. “Possibly it is best to put aside the provocative, but ultimately unconvincing, thesis of Roberts and, instead, to suggest that [military] innovation and development were concentrated in the late fifteenth and then again in the late seventeenth centuries.”

Black locates the proper military revolution in “the second half of the period 1560 – 1760,” when “the decisive development […] in the case of most military forces […] were primarily found.” It was the period when the sharp changes in warfare occurred: rapid shifts in weaponry and tactics, the coming of decisive battles and the greater size and strength of the armies. Black’s conclusion is as convincing as the eyewitness reportage.

However, he suddenly turns back to the ostracized period of 1560 to 1660 and elevates it on the pinnacle of the highest importance but in a completely different manner from Roberts.

Black depicts an impressive picture as most of the European states submerged into the bloody chaos of civil wars since around the middle of the 16th century. The larger armies, created by the new fighting technique in the middle of the 15th to the middle of the 16th centuries required larger resources that were extracted by the oppressive state institutions.

The social resistance to them caused political crises from the mid-16th to the mid-17th centuries. These were solved by the militarization of society that “integrated society and state.” “The revival of consensus” between the rulers and elites and post-Reformation “ideological cohesion” “brought new political stability to many states.” It is the socio-political results of the period of 1560 to 1660 that enable Black “to reverse the relationship” [proposed by Roberts and Parker] between “the absolutist states” and “new model armies.” The former were not the products of the latter. “The origins of late-seventeenth-century absolutism can be found both in […] reaction to the turmoil of the sixteenth century, […] and in a series of political crises in the first half of the seventeenth.”

The socio-political stability of absolutism “had important military consequences” because “it was the more stable domestic political circumstances of most states[…] that made these [military] changes possible.” “Thus, the modern art of war, with its large professional armies, and concentrated yet mobile firepower, was created at the same time as – indeed made possible and necessary – the creation of the modern state.”

Glete denotes the period of 1560 to 1660 as “crisis and change: the rise of the fiscal-military state model […]. [It] saw domestic political crises sweep over most of Europe, including Eastern Europe and the Ottoman Empire.” Glete considers that the military and administrative know-how of the fiscal-military state were invented by 1600, but the socio-political consensus necessary for their implementation was unattainable as the states were “in internal conflict” and with “civil war” around them.

Glete denies that the military innovations of the gunpowder revolution caused the century of civil war in Europe: the first unsuccessful attempts to implement the model of the fiscal-military state occasioned it. The period of 1560 to 1660 was a “crisis of transformation” “from the state as the arena for the aggregation of the political interest into a centre of huge and complex fiscal-military organization.”

It was “a decisive phase in European state formation.” Glete’s third phase of the development of the European fiscal-military state lasted from the mid-17th century to the first decades of the 18th century. It was “the period of maturity” of the fiscal-military state that “developed with striking rapidity.” Therein is the important difference between Glete’s views and Black’s. Black considers that the third circle which came in c. 1660 was being truly revolutionary because it was not “the culmination of a supposed earlier revolution” but “a new development” of “scant continuity” with the “desperate expedients” of the past. In everything else, the descriptions of this period by Black and Glete coincide.

The veiled dialogue between Black and Glete presents the military revolution as the cycle of three circles. The first stage, (counting in hundred years) was 1460 to 1560, the period of the chaotic military changes associated with the introduction of firearms and organizational military reform.

The second stage, 1560 to 1660, was the period of civil war. The third stage, 1660 to 1760, was the socio-political rally which gave life to the radical new warfare of the Early Modern Period. The first and the third stages are relatively well-discussed, however mostly without addressing the close ties between the military changes and political transformation. Little is known about the second, intermediate stage. It might be significant that Roberts’ period of military changes takes its seat accurately in it.

Were Roberts’ tactically decisive warfighting episodes of the Netherlandish Eighty Years’ War and German Thirty Years’ War the species of civil war to which both of these conflicts belonged? It is not a question that is answered because it was never asked. Black stops at a high point: “[T]he most conclusive campaigns of this period occurred in civil wars.” Civil War as a socio-military phenomenon is obstructively poorly studied. The second circle of Black’s cycle remains an enigma.

Black’s cycle lays out the process of the military revolution as segmented but integral. It suits the comparison of different national cases, warfare models, and socio-political patterns inside each of the stages where they are truly comparable.

And it provides a comparison between the stages regarding their basic difference and integrity as the parts of an all-in-one phenomenon. A further significance of Black’s cycle of the military revolution is its universalism. The socio-military transformation at least in two regions, neighboring but separate from Western and North-Central Europe, Eastern Europe and Ottoman Empire, conforms to Black’s cycle. In both leading polities of Eastern Europe, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and Muscovy (Russia), the stage of the Renaissance military changes was closed by civil war, Polish-Lithuanian Deluge, Potop, in the middle of the 17th century and the Muscovite Time of Trouble, Smuta, in its first decades.

Then comes the stage of (aborted or enduring) fiscal-military consolidation and the rise of the regular army came. In the Ottoman Empire, the stage of the Renaissance military changes was followed by the civil war of the Celali rebels in the last decade of the 16th to the first decades of the 17th centuries. Then the stage of the warmonger consolidation followed, which drove the Ottomans to Candia, Kiev and Vienna.

The universality of Black’s cycle is the prime confirmation that while being an abstraction accurately presents historical reality: and it works. Together Glete’s methodology on the national cases and Black’s chronological cycle became the most instrumental revision of Roberts’ concept of the military revolution that transformed it from being a description of the particular period of West-European history into the universal methodology of the study of the global Early Modern Period.

Most of the scholars researching the military revolution focus on the proliferation of firearms. Meanwhile, it is of secondary importance to the concept. The proliferation of firearms is a precondition to the military revolution which is the transformation of the society and political regime through the impact of military changes. The means of the military hold over the society and political regimes have to be established. It is the issue of the first importance for the study of the military revolution.

And the influence of the European military changes on the global order is an adjacent issue. The new technical, organizational and tactical solutions that enhanced the fighting capabilities of armies and the efficiency of the military administration in the first circle of the military revolution are a matter of linear history, an evolution. Studying the military revolution in its first stage, it is necessary to look for those military changes that sharply debilitated Late Medieval warfare, ruptured the fabric of the Late Medieval society and burst it with civil war.

It is also necessary to track the military innovations that had the potential to reconstruct the socio-political debris into the new model of the fiscal-military (Jan Glete) or elite-ruler consensual (Jeremy Black) states. We have “to link grand [socio-political] sweeps to particular [military technical, tactical and organizational] developments.” We have to establish liaisons dangereuses.

A duel of historiography

The main criticism of Roberts’ thesis is directed by a perception of how dramatic the introduction of firearms was for military affairs, and in particular for the fighting capability and composition of armies. Roberts’ notion of the impact of tactics on society and political regimes earned much less attention because its agents remain unclear.

The urging of the absolutist state with its coercive bureaucracy by military pressure remains the main and often sole explanation, and little has changed in this field since Roberts’ and Parker’s respective seminal studies. The reverse of this order of causation according to Jeremy Black’s view that is cited above remains the main deviation. The historiographic picture of the military revolution in Eastern Europe sits within this frame. The front of the discussion divides the supporters of the onward military causation of the socio-political changes and the followers of the reverse view.

Robert Frost opens his essay on the military revolution in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth by observing that the West-European experience of a “response for military demands […] helped bring about the emergence of more effective centralized systems of government.” Frost looks at Geoffrey Parker’s revisionist thesis that “changes in warfare were ‘accompanied’ by the changes in the nature of states” as the weakness of Parker’s position in comparison with the Roberts’ initial immediate tactical causation of social and political changes.

If “the relationship between governments, armies and societies had fundamentally changed by the early eighteenth century,” Frost insists, something caused it. Marshall Poe, a prominent scholar on the 15th- to 17th- century Muscovy, sees the causation issue similarly. “Under pressure to field ever larger and more complex forces, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European leaders organized complex administrative systems which, in turn, spurred the process of bureaucratization of governmental service.”

At the same time, the consensus of Frost and Poe about the onward military causation of the socio-political changes in Western Europe does not mean that they agree about their causation in Eastern Europe, in its two principal entities of the time, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and Muscovy.

Frost builds his conclusion about the Polish-Lithuanian military revolution by comparing the fighting capabilities of the Polish-Lithuanian and Swedish, presumed to be West-European forces. He finds them on equal terms, as the Western tactical innovations that emphasized Roberts and Parker were effectively parried by Polish-Lithuanian fighting technique.

Frost’s impressive comparison avoids the question which he points to at the beginning of his analysis. Why did the Western-style battlefield innovations produce the mighty socio-political transformation, and why the Polish-Lithuanian fighting technique, while no less combat-effective, did not? Another unanswered question follows: Maybe the Polish-Lithuanian military innovations did produce a different socio-political transformation than the fiscal-military, absolutist, bureaucratic state that was created by the Western military innovations? What did they produce? Handicapped absolutism, early liberal democracy, noble anarchy or some other political brat?

Frost fixes the watershed of the military revolution in the 1660s dividing the 17th century into two distinct halves. In the first one, the military innovations revolutionized the fighting capability of the armies, and they were grasped by the Polish-Lithuanian military commanders.

However, the political constitution to utilize the new combat technique in its full superiority was not yet comprehended. In the second half, it became clear that this constitution is an absolutist bureaucratic state with a standing regular army. In some way the military innovations did not work properly without this constitution, as only the two halves together are the integral military revolution. Its combat component was not apt without the absolutist political regime. The Polish-Lithuanian nobles abhorred it and discarded the military revolution for their Republic.

“It was the failure of the noble citizens of the Commonwealth to cross this psychological watershed which doomed it to a decline which was by no means inevitable.” By 1700 it was too late to catch up with the forerunners, and in a few decades the Commonwealth collapsed.

After this extensive analysis, Frost predictably reverses his initial view on the causation of military and socio-political affairs. “The Commonwealth’s experience casts serious doubt on the view that the tactical changes on the battlefield led necessarily to political change, or that the relationship between political and military change was smooth and inevitable.”

Frost resolves this question, the principal one for the military revolution debates, in an elusive way. “Military and administrative change was closely linked.” “The question of whether military change arouse from or caused the ‘absolute’ state is in many respects a false one.”

The military revolution of Poe’s theoretical entree is that the socio-political changes were pushed on by the technical and tactical military changes. by the middle of the 16th century the “borrowing, assimilating, and fielding of relatively advanced European arms and military organizations […] in Russia produced significant social changes, perhaps more significant than those seen in other parts of Europe.” Poe’s causation between the military changes and social transformation is steady but suddenly it cracks.

He substitutes the transformation of warfare with a “halting, gradual process of military reform misleadingly though conveniently termed the “Military Revolution.” Together with Eric Lohr, Poe advocates that “the autocratically organized Russian ruling class was able to transform Russia into […] ‘a garrison state'”. The effective state and capable modern army were created by some “court elite” which was rallied by the idea of national greatness.

Lohr and Poe see this situation in Muscovy at the end of the 15th century, two centuries before the ascendance of the mobilizing elites in Western and North-Central Europe. Why was the Muscovite elite such an able upstart? Was it in some way enlightened by the Byzantine emigrants or divinely guided? Lohr and Poe do not provide an answer.

“First, the autocratic state[…] was born.” Then the military reforms were carried out by “the Muscovite elite [that] set about importing Western military technologies.” The necessary administrative class and the professional soldiers were brought up inside the elite.

Poe views the social changes in Muscovy as the imposed “stratification” resulting from “the government’s attempts to raise competitive armies and to mobilize resources in society to support them.” Western monarchs could use the existing “estates, town and corporations as vehicles to mobilize support and resources.” “Primitive” “Muscovite society contained few such groups,” and “the Muscovite elite had to create organized groups in society to respond to its needs.”

It was the stunning triumph of the “elite” over the political constitution and society. Nothing remained from the initial Poe thesis of the socio-political transformation originated in the military changes. He does not explain his swap, it is simply stated as a matter of fact.

Frost’s and Poe’s examples demonstrate the phenomenon of the historiography of the military revolution in Eastern Europe as full of duelling not between different historians but within each of them. Frost is a historian of events and people, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth is his area of commitment.

Poe is a historian of ideas and institutions, and Muscovy-Russia is his operand. These two leading historians of Eastern Europe in the Early Modern Period together embrace the entirety of subjects and methods of the historical studies on the subcontinent. And they both synchronously overturn their view of the causation of changes between military and socio-political affairs after a thorough study of the military revolution in their respective nations of expertise. Why?

Early professional armies pushed constitutional change forward

Nothing in military history surpasses the importance of combat, – battles, sieges, raids, maneuvers and operations. Military matters outside of combat, – composition and command of forces, mobilization and reforms, weaponry and fortification, morale and learning about war, – are input to fighting the absolute value of which is its output, victory or defeat. It is the link between combat to society and political regimes.

Do military matters outside of combat determine the course and outcome of fighting thus confirming the social and political guide to combat? Or does fighting give a mighty push to extra-combat military matters, that in turn shape the socio-political structures? Could we find and explain the impact of combat on them? It is the decisive challenge to the vitality of the military revolution concept.

Fig. 2. The Medieval roots of the Russian military revolution.

In 1398 the amphibious forces of the Novgorodian Republic sieged the Muscovite fortress Orelets at the river Northern Dvina.

The Novgorodian landing troops were well-equipped with the range of the siege machines that were transported dissembled, and built onsite.

The Russian Illustrated Anthological Chronicle of the Sixteenth Century. The Second Osterman’s Volume, Moscow. The library of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Jl. 599. Courtesy of Runivers, Russia

Table 1, Combats in Eastern Europe, the middle of 15th – 16th cc. in the appendix to the current essay contains twenty military events in Eastern Europe within the first circle of the military revolution cycle. There are battles, sieges, raids, operations, and campaigns among them. Some of them are renowned and some of them lack attention.

The objective of Table 1 is not to describe the battlefield events that presumably determined the international fortune of the East European nations but to present those combats that promise a fruitful analysis of the issue set out above. The main properties of the military events are described in Table 1 and their perception by historians is utilized in the narrative of the current essay to assess their importance for the military revolution the phenomena of which are history and whose concept is historiography.

On 18 September 1454 the army of the Teutonic Order crushed the Polish army at the fortress Konitz in Prussia, the Middle Baltics, initiating the chain of military events that either pushed ahead the socio-political transformation of Eastern Europe in the Early Modern Period or were imposed by this transformation (Table 1, Entry No 1).

Robert Frost concludes that the battle of Konitz “offers little for the students of military science but in terms of its results, its influence on the future course of European history makes it at least as significant as Tannenberg [the battle of Poland and Lithuania against the Order in 1410].” Frost admits that the battle of Konitz was the key military event decided by old-style armies, weaponry and tactics.

However, only the defeated Polish army was particularly medieval. The victorious Teutonic army at Konitz was different from the former Order’s combination of the monk-brothers, guest crusaders, land-allotted knights and urban militia that had been smashed by Polish fighting capability since the Tannenberg battle. It was a professional mercenary army adept at using the advanced weaponry and tactics of the Hussite Wars in Bohemia in the 1420s to 1430s and the Hungarian wars against the Ottomans in the 1440s.

William Urban, a prolific Anglophone historian of the Teutonic Order, did not research the sudden appearance of the Order’s professional army. He only records it even though this army was perhaps the most important Teutonic achievement, one widely envied and borrowed.

The facts make it look like the professional army of the Teutonic Order was created in response to the mutiny of the Teutonic estates that deprived the Order of its traditional estate-supplied forces. At the same time, the reverse order is more probable.

The estates’ mutiny followed the Order’s recruiting of the professional army after the miserable fighting experience of the estate troops pushed the Order to the brink of survival in the conflict with Poland. Polish historians Mariam Biskup and Gerard Labuda demonstrate that conflict over taxes and tolls, land ownership and trade monopolies was the reason for the Union of the Teutonic estates’, Bund’s, revolt against the Order’s government. They do not suppose that the harsh Teutonic fiscalism gave to the Order the army of the new model.

The Order’s professional army was built up by the Order’s administration which was no doubt the dictatorship of the religious fanatics, but it was a unique government devoid of the ordinary Late Medieval shortcomings of the aristocratic egotism or petty greediness of the estates. Neither Robert Frost nor William Urban links this Teutonic administration specifically to the modernization of the Teutonic army on the eve of the Konitz battle.

For Jan Glete the permanent armies were the elements of the growing fiscal-military organization controlled by states. Before the Teutonic army of 1454 only the Italian Republics of Florence and Venice, and the duchy of Milan had been able to establish professional statal armies instead of the social armies of levies and militia interspersed by mercenary bands and private retinues that had been dominant in Europe.

The professional army of the Teutonic order was the first example in Eastern Europe of the non-social mercenary armies that were coming to dominate European warfare in the 16th to the first half of the 17th centuries, and this vitally important change was recognized by David Parrott and recently accentuated by Alexander Querengässer. Querengässer does not develop his attractive thesis but Parrott explains that the superiority of the private forces depended on operational warfare, “continuous war fought over multiple campaigns.” It is exactly the case of the Teutonic successes against Polish odds in the campaign of 1454 to 1456. The Teutonic initiative delivered a similar lesson to Eastern Europe that the Italian one had to Western Europe.

The Konitz debacle and subsequent failures of the traditional Polish forces acted on Poland like Leon Trotsky’s “whip of the external necessity,” and Walter Runciman’s warning that the timely replacement of the “outdated military practices” is the issue of survival.

Polish scholars Mariam Biskup and Tadeusz Grabarczyk emphasize the impact of the Polish levy’s disaster at Konitz on the transformation of the Polish army into a professional force. Frost, Grabarczyk and Brian Davies describe how Poland switched its forces from the gentry levy to the professional army of the native commissioned cavalry and contracted infantry of the German and Czech mercenaries.

The command of the Polish forces was transferred from the social leaders and territorial administrators to the career generals, hetmans. Katarzyna Niemczyk and Zdzisław Żygulski reveal that soon this office became permanent and was split between the office of the chief military administrator, crown hetman, and the office of the operational commander, field hetman.

The reform coincided with the trend towards the specialized separated military administration and combat command in the European armies of the Early Modern Period, which emerged in Italian Renaissance states as well.

The performance of the Teutonic professional army in the battle of Konitz accomplished two contrary social and political turnovers at once. The Polish setback cancelled the prospects of appeasement between the Teutonic Order and the estates of the Teutonic state. The Order aspired to absolute victory over the estates and became the theocratic military dictatorship, independent from society, an exemplary forerunner of European absolutism.

The secularization of the Teutonic Order and its conversion into the hereditary dukedom, accomplished in 1525 by the last Prussian High Master of the Order, Albrecht of Prussia (Brandenburg-Ansbach or Hohenzollern) and his arbitrary change from Roman Catholicism to Lutheranism for himself and as compulsory for his subjects was the first act of this kind in Europe, reflecting a pattern of an absolutist religious constitution.

At the same time, the constitutional balance in Poland dramatically shifted from royal authority to the nobility, szlachta, the power of which was embodied in its legislative Diet, Sejm. The royal prerogatives and domain were appropriated by the Sejm. They were alienated from the person of the king and turned into the possession of the szlachta’s corporation Corona Regni Poloniae.

The changes among the szlachta as the social estate were profound. The equality of the hireling military service in the specialized military structure significantly differed from the service in the feudal levy where a coat of arms’ clan structure and territorial composition dominated. The service in the commissioned professional army slowly changed the social inequality inside the szlachta with the feeling of equal political rights and social privileges of all nobles and an understanding of their common class interest.

Frost describes how the bargaining over the finances that were needed to build up the professional army strengthened the class of nobles and weakened the royal authority. King Kasimir IV was forced to declare the turnover of power at the levy’s assembly in its camps in Cerekwica and Opoki where levy established itself as the Mounted Diet, Sejm Konny, just before and soon after the Konitz battle. It was constituted in the Nieszawa Statutes (a kind of Constitution) of 1454 which started the transformation of the Polish Central-European estate monarchy into the specific form of the Republic of Nobles that was the response of Polish society to the pressure of the military changes. Frost’s description of the Konitz defeat’s effect contradicts one of the key ideas of the military revolution concept whereby the resource mobilization for war invariably saw bureaucratic royal power take over estate governance.

Nothing of this kind happened in Poland despite the extraction of resources for war increasing and their skilled allocation improving. Anna Sucheni-Grabowska, a Polish scholar, reveals the particular form of resource mobilization for the war that was found in Poland after the Konitz disaster. This was the transfer of the royal domain from the private enterprise of the king into the commonwealth of the nobility’s corporation.

It seems that Frost’s “weakening of the royal authority” was the reform that improved the fiscal effectiveness of the royal domain and channeled its funds to the military but in a non-absolutist manner.

The Polish military change and political transformation paid dividends on 17 September 1462 when the Polish army destroyed the Teutonic forces in the battle of Schwetz (Table 1, Entry No 2). Despite both sides being exhausted and down to meagre numbers, the battle of Schwetz decided the outcome of the Thirteen Years’ War between Poland and the Teutonic Order, and determined the future of Prussia, Polish social structure and its political constitution.

Marian Małowist, a Polish Marxist scholar, demonstrates how the Polish grab of Danzig and other staple ports of the Prussian Vistula’s estuary connected the inner Polish rural economy via the Vistula riverway to the Baltic trade with its West-European markets. Since the middle of the 15th century, their demand soared for grain and other agricultural goods, and raw materials.

The Polish landowning nobility used their legislative monopoly, secured at the time of the Konitz battle, to enserf the peasantry and arrogate its lands for manorial farming, Folwark, to produce the exported goods.

The nobility excluded the town merchants from their export trade and dealt directly with the Western wholesale merchants in the Prussian staple ports. The harsh Polish serfdom and weakening town bourgeoisie were the social consequences brought about by the battle of Schwetz.

Frost argues against the view of the domination of this economic system in Poland and its export-oriented rush. Dominant or not, this picture does not correspond to one of the main ideas of the military revolution concept that the rise of the town’s “third class” and cancellation of the “feudal” serfdom invariably accompanied the rise of the standing armies, infantry and firearms.

The consequences of the establishment of a professional army in Poland were huge but different. Both Frost and Małowist stop short of defining the Polish szlachta-dominated enserfing political regime of the 16th to 18th centuries, often titled the Republic of Nobles, to be the legitimate scion of the battles of Konitz and Schwetz or at last their bastard. This political regime lasted until the Partitions and cancellation of Poland at the end of the 18th century, the full cycle of the military revolution.

Polish decline was not “by no means inevitable,” as Frost proposes, but was an inborn property of the socio-political regime that was established in Poland during and in the aftermath of the Thirteen Years’ War. Three hundred years of enduring this regime and its remarkable survival through the Polish-Lithuanian civil war of the Deluge in the middle of the 17th century blocked the transformation of the Commonwealth into the fiscal-military state and denied the integration and emancipation of its non-szlachta social and ethnic groups that inevitably doomed it.

Fig. 3. The battle where the Muscovite regular heavy cavalry was born.

The servants vested the mail and plate armour on the Muscovite grand prince Vasily II before the bat- tle of Suzdal against the Golden Horde’s raiding corps in 1445.

Vasily II rearranged his court forces into the regular regiment that became his leverage to consolidate Muscovy.

The Russian Illustrated Anthological Chronicle of the Sixteenth Century. The Golitsyn Volume, Moscow The library of the Russian Academy of Sciences, JI. 649 06 Courtesy of Runivers, Russia

Combat innovations called forth the social classes

The almost simultaneous events in the Eastern Baltic confirm that the dramatic social consequences of the Thirteen Years’ War were not a historical accident or mischance. They were the new paradigm for the military’s influence on society and political regimes. On 14 July 1471, the Muscovite vanguard corps destroyed the army of the Novgorodian Republic in the battle of the river Shelon (Table 1, Entry No 3).

Gustav Alef was the first in Anglophone historiography to find that the Muscovite army that achieved the landslide at the Shelon was a force of significantly different composition than the Medieval forces of North-Eastern Rus where Muscovy was consolidating. The Medieval Russian forces were the levy, urban militia, courts of semi-sovereign princes, and private mercenary bands. Alef accurately points out the outstanding components of the victorious Muscovite corps, its regular household regiment, dvor, mercenary Tatars, and boyar professional commanders leading the troops instead of the semi-sovereign princes.

Alef also detects the period when these innovations were introduced, between the lost battle of Suzdal in 1445 and the battle of the Shelon in 1471. Despite the prominent participation of the Muscovite dvor, a household cavalry regiment, as the main assault corps of the Muscovite army in the battle of the Shelon and other important engagements of the epoch, especial research on its military function is rare. The fundamental book by Aleksander Zimin as well as the studies of Mikhail Bentsianov and Aleksander Korzinin are devoted primarily to the social composition of the grand prince’s court and service relations of its members to the sovereign but not to its fighting commitment, that was underlined by Gustav Alef.

The latter is important because, as Benjamin de Carvalho advocates, “the standing armies were also a product of […] changes in the social function and role of the warring classes; from private feudal lords to servants of the public interest of the sovereign.” The fighting dvor, a household cavalry regiment of the grand prince was the institute where these changes unfolded to spread over Muscovy.

The Tatar mercenaries of the Muscovite army are also better studied as an anthropological group than a military force. An American scholar Janet Martin calls attention to the fact that between three different functions of the allied-vassal Tatar polity of Kasimov that was established in the 1450s, the supply of the mercenary cavalry was prominent.

A Russian scholar Andrey Nesin shows that the Kasimov regiment had an organization different from that of the Tatar traditional clan forces. The men of the regiment weren’t distributed in clan units but served directly as the rank-and-files of the Kasimov ruler, and the officers of the regiment weren’t the heads of clans but were appointed by the ruler.

It was a combat-effective professional structure. Bulat Rakhimzyanov relates that the Kasimov rulers received an annual pension as a reward for their mercenary military service. Kasimov Tatar troops were built according to the general line of the European warfare development of the second half of the 15th century to make war with contracted or commissioned armies, especially when some special fighting techniques were in need like the Swiss pike columns, Genoese crossbowmen, English archers, the light cavalry of Balkan stradiots or Spanish jinetes, Czech wagon-camp, etc. The Muscovite generals needed the Tatar mounted bow-shooters.

The Shelon’s landslide confirmed the fighting superiority of the Muscovite professional corps over the Novgorodian levy and militia. The consequences of the battle of the Shelon demonstrated the ability of effective military changes to diffuse, and if necessary, to break the social and political barriers. Richard Hellie, an American scholar, ties the social and political transformation of Muscovy (Russia) at the turn of the 15th and 16th centuries with the Muscovite destruction of the Novgorodian army and the brutal merging of the Novgorodian Republic. “Numerous lands were confiscated from Novgorod boyars, merchants, and church institutions and subsequently distributed to individuals loyal to Moscow […] to military men.” From the battle of the Shelon “the middle service class had become the backbone of the Russian army” and the mailed cavalrymen trained and equipped mainly for bow-shooting and less to attack at home with a spear and sabre became its principal fighter.

The Muscovite merger of the Novgorodian Republic took almost a decade and witnessed two sieges of Novgorod with the deployment of large armies and artillery bombardment. The Muscovite artillery had an impact on the consolidation of the realm and the shaping of the national territory similar to the impact of the French royal artillery in the closing period of the Hundred Years’ War. The rebellious towns and centers of the foreign interventions were equally suppressed by Muscovite gunfire.

The debacle of the Novgorodian Republic and severe repressions against its social classes shifted the balance of power from the estates to the Grand Prince’s authority everywhere in North–Eastern Rus. It was the founding moment of the Muscovite authoritarian tradition. The Muscovite arrogation of the Novgorodian state and property also gave birth to the Muscovite bureaucracy in military and civil administration. Marshall Poe describes the emergence of the military “scriptorium” in Moscow, following the merger of Novgorod, to manage the build-up of forces and their operational planning, as well as “prebendal estates” and “direct taxation” to support the army. The main body of the army was no longer levy and militia but semi-standing territorial companies established first over the former Novgorodian Republic and then overall in Muscovy. Michael Paul, an American scholar, sees this organizational reform, together with the introduction of firearms, as evidence of the beginning of the military revolution in Muscovy. The organizational reform consolidated the former various martial social groups of free landowners, hirelings and personal dependents, who had reported by the chain of masters to the semi-sovereign princes, into the integral service class managed by the grand prince’s Military Chancery, Razryadny Prikaz.

Did the men of the new Muscovite territorial cavalry compose the Hellie’s middle service class from the very beginning or were they the military personnel looking after their position in Muscovite society for a much longer period? It is a debatable issue. Chronologically their military commitment came first, and it is an example of the outright socialization of the military but something different from what is expected from the military revolution.

The pace of the Muscovite military changes was fast. When on 8–11 October 1480 the much superior army of the Grand Horde, the mightier successor of the Mongolian Medieval super-empire Golden Horde, charged over the fords of the river Ugra to advance on Moscow it was halted by a Muscovite army completely different from the array that the Grand Horde expected to meet (Table 1, Entry No 4).

The Muscovite troops were not an outdated combination of the gentry levy and urban militia with court bands. Besides the standing household cavalry, they consisted of the territorial cavalry companies of the service class. “The middle servicemen were neither a standing army nor infantrymen, the basis of armies in the wake of the Military Revolution, […] furthermore, their weaponry comprised bows and arrows, swords, and spears, and not gunpowder weapons.”

Michael Paul considers that Muscovy had to copy the outdated technique of the Tatars and Poles-Lithuanians to oppose them. Meanwhile, from the practical combat point of view, the value of the military revolution consists of the deployment of superior fighting innovations against a backward enemy. The alleged backwardness of their enemies was the motivation to push Muscovites to the newest warfare techniques and not veer from them.

Vitaly Penskoy, a Russian scholar disposed to the military revolution concept, considers that the confrontation of Muscovy with the Tatar successors of the Golden Horde caused the “orientalization” of the Muscovite army. Penskoy denies the well-established Anglophone version of the Muscovite borrowing of the Mongolian-Tatar political institutions and military practices due to the two ages of the Yoke, the North-Eastern Rus’ dependence and its rulers’ servitude to the Golden Horde. The latter idea is presented in the studies of Iver Neumann, Donald Ostrowsky , Jaroslaw Pelenski, and Matthew Romaniello.

Penskoy’s “orientalization” is exactly the phenomenon of his interpretation of the military revolution beginning at the turn of the 15th to 16th centuries, the Muscovite synthesis of “eastern” weaponry, armor and fighting techniques with the achievements of the “gunpowder revolution” such as the artillery and infantry of handgunners.

Penskoy depicts the “first stage” of the Muscovite military revolution as being the combination of simultaneous “progress” with the adoption of advanced gunpowder weaponry and tactics, and professional military organization from Western Europe, and the imitation of the backward but efficient Tatar fighting practices. Penskoy’s military revolution in Muscovy is intensive but far from linear and far from parallel to its Western co-runner.

The Grand Horde was unable to overrun the Ugra’s crossings, abstained from engaging the Muscovite army and retreated to the steppes despite the Muscovite stance becoming desperate in face of the Grand Horde’s numerical odds after the Ugra froze.

Muscovy soon eclipsed the Grand Horde as the military hegemon of Easternmost Europe and Western Eurasia. The geopolitical consequences of this shift were dramatic, as the whole nomadic civilization of steppe Eurasia that dominated the regions from the Northern Black Sea and the Caspian Sea shores, North Caucasus and Central Asia to Northern India, Southern Siberia, Mongolia and Northern China fell into decline.

The Eurasian nomads achieved great conquests in the 16th to 17th centuries, nevertheless they lost undisputable military superiority over their settled neighbors, a fact confirmed forever at the Ugra’s crossings in 1480. The influence of the Ugra standoff on the Muscovite society was similarly profound.

The lack of numbers that the Muscovite rulers suffered from in their duel with the Grand Horde over the Ugra moved them to expand the service land allotments system from the personal deal between the ruler and warrior to the general principle of the organization of the Muscovite service class. The allotments and service obligations of their recipients were standardized, and the cash stipend was introduced as the basis for campaigning remuneration making the military service of the service class a mixed obligation and hire arrangement.

Not only in conquered Novgorod, where the prebendal system was close to the local military tradition but over the whole of North-Eastern Rus where it contradicted the existing proprietary constitution, the prebendal allotment was imposed. The chosen men of the urban militia, dependent retainers, some free peasants and marginals were pressed into the new social strata of the military servitors. Gustav Alef detects this change, and Russian scholars Yury Alekseyev and Aleksander Kopanev accentuate it.

Mikhail Bentsianov describes how from the reforms of the prebendal allotment system after the Ugra standoff, the true existence of the middle service class of pomeshchiks could be tracked. Richard Helie affirms that this class “constituted the major military force of the consolidated Muscovite state until the completion of the gunpowder revolution in the second half of the seventeenth century.”

The standoff at the Ugra had also structural consequences for Muscovy’s political regime. At the moment of perilous strain, Grand Prince Ivan III called up the first legislative of the estate representatives to vote for maximum mobilization and to take an uncompromising stance against the Grand Horde.

The military service class dominated the legislative until its final act, the Law Codification of Empress Catherine II the Great in 1768. Considering that the class of pomeshchiks presided over the Muscovite-Russian political hierarchy and social structure until at least the end of the 19th century, the social impulse driving the Ugra standoff is difficult to overestimate.

However, the five century-long social momenta that it pushed looks strange perceived through the lense of the presumed military revolution, because the Muscovite military service class was not created by or associated with the firearms. Together with the Polish republic of szlachta, the Muscovite tsardom of pomeshchiks demonstrates that the battlefield events of the early military revolution were able to create social phenomena of great endurance.

Were the constitutional and social consequences of the battlefield events, that are presented above, an organic development? Or were they the products of the reflection of the dominant political class, as proposed by Robert Frost? Were they the results of the social dirigisme of the “court elite,” as is argued by Marshall Poe? The current author inclines to organic development.

The Polish and Muscovite changes of warfare combined the initiative of the field commanders and the central military reforms. Supporting the former and providing the latter, the rulers of both realms were not looking for a new political constitution or social classes but for effective military personnel and the improved performance of the troops. The rulers and commanders borrowed or invented the military patterns that turned into social and political changes on their own.

The social accommodation of the new professional armies was the political action of their personnel, social groups and political factions linked to the new armies. This self-made manner of social and political transformation, independent of the will of the rulers and elite, became the reason why the military innovations and the socio-political structures that they created came into conflict with Late Medieval society and the mentality of the epoch and destroyed them in subsequent civil wars a century later.

The conflicts push the nation-state forward

From May to July of 1487, when the Muscovite forces besieged the city of Kazan, the Kazan – Muscovite confrontation was perceived as a clash of cosmic dimensions due to its religious, Christian–Muslim, and ethnic Russian–Tatar content (Table 1, Entry No 5). Kazan surrendered, and the Khanate of Kazan was reduced to a Muscovite protectorate, despite the lineage of its statehood descended from the Golden Horde that was much superior over the Muscovite status. The Kazan Khanate was also a Muslim state, religiously alien to Orthodox Muscovy. The Muscovite protectorate over the Kazan Khanate was the first acquisition of the forthcoming Russian Empire. It foreran Russian expansion beyond the political body of the former pre-Mongolian Rus, first into the ecumene of the Golden Horde and then out of its reach.

The studies by Russian Mari and Tatarstan historians Alexander Bakhtin and Bulat Khamidullin demonstrate that the Muscovite taking of Kazan in 1487 was the pivotal event in the geopolitical rivalry between the Grand Principality of Moscow, which was merging the polities of North-Eastern Rus on a Russian ethnic and Orthodox religious basis, and the Khanate of Kazan, which aspired to control the Tatar, Turkic and Ugric peoples of Easternmost Europe on the Golden Horde’s conquering tradition.

The Muscovite army overran Kazan and Moscow obscured Kazan as the political hegemon of the region. Bakhtin and Khamidullin do not reach the conclusion that is apparent here. The confrontation of the two emerging polities ran exactly according to the European trend that accompanied the military revolution. It was the disappearance of the states of the conquering, dynastic, economic cooperative and territorial formation and the rise of the ethnic nation-states and religious community-states (often coinciding), forerunners of the Modern nations. In 1487, the statehood of the Kazan Khanate was not cancelled by the Muscovite protectorate but tremendous shifts of this kind rarely occur at once but require long repeated actions, and Muscovy was stubborn enough to deliver it over the century ahead. This Muscovite stubbornness rather confirms than denies the historical sense of this struggle.

Besides the geopolitical consequences, the Muscovite taking of Kazan in 1487 had important practical lessons for fortress architecture in Eastern Europe that became closely bound to geopolitics. Michael Paul considers that the Muscovites “never adopted the trace italienne but used the ‘reinforced castle’ style of fortification.” They were more committed to strengthening their palisade-type fortifications than building the stone bastions. The Muscovite taking of Kazan in 1487 was the first big siege in Eastern Europe that was decided by gunfire.

The impression was sound. Soon after it, as Gustav Alef finds, the Livonian Order, Muscovy’s rival in the Eastern Baltic, implemented the first known technological embargo against Muscovy and restricted its purchase of firearms, raw materials for their manufacture and hiring of the craft’s masters. Richard Hellie attributes the “radical changes” in the East-European fortifications following “the progress in artillery” to the closing decades of the 15th century. Russian military historian Pavel Rappoport and historian of architecture Nikolay Kradin advocate that the deployment of the wall-crushing firearms substantially changed the construction of the wooden fortress defenses in Eastern Europe, where they dominated.

At the end of the 15th century, the wooden wall of the vertical lumbers dug into the earthen mound, tyn in the Russian fortification lexicon, and Michael Paul’s “palisade” was changed to the composite construction consisting of the large square wooden frames filled with pebble and clay, gorodnya. The resulting construction was almost impregnable for the wall-crushing artillery. Was it “trace kazanienne,” the best possible alternative to the stone bastions considering the materials and skills abundant in Eastern Europe? Probably, it was.

Michael Paul’s conclusion that “Russia’s technical advances in warfare were usually made by Western experts imported into Russia” is a misestimation. The Muscovite preferred to solve the same fortification issues that challenged the Western architects in a locally suitable way. Lithuanians and Kazanians, the Muscovite rivals in the vast East-European forests, acted in parallel.

The new fortress design allowed the Muscovite rulers to aggregate the national territory in the frontier areas to the east and south, and to the west in the borderland with Lithuania, a huge territorial conglomerate that soon became the main prey of the Muscovite expansion. Jeremy Black is right when he states that the “fortresses performed the crucial strategic function of securing lines of supply and communication, for example […] between the Baltic and Black Seas and the great river routes of Eastern Europe. […] Fortifications stabilised the inchoate borders of Eastern Europe and were the signs and sources of political control in an area of multinational empires and no firm historical boundaries.” The invention of the affordable and reliable fortress design led to the division of Eastern Europe for the territories of nation-building.

The nation-building at the expense of the Golden Hord’s conquering legacy and Lithuanian dynastic conglomerate soon became the norm for the emerging East-European nations. The Polish expansion to the Northern Black Sea region unfolded on 8 to 9 September 1487 when the Polish regular court cavalry destroyed the major Crimean raiding party in double combat at the river Shavranka and the village of Koperstin in Western Podolia (Table 1, Entry No 6). The outcome of the combat at Shavranka and Koperstin confirmed that the professional cavalry troops were able to out maneuver the large Crimean raiding parties and destroy them in direct battle. A Polish historian Marek Plewczyński states that the victories of the Polish regular court troops over the Tatar raiding parties at Savranka and Koperstin became the basis for the important argument for establishing the permanent corps of the southern border defence, known as Obrona Potoczna since the 1520s and Wojsko Kwarciane after 1563. The corps had the composition of the regular troops established in the Thirteen Years’ War against the Teutonic Order. It consisted of the native Polish commissioned cavalry and native commissioned or foreign contracted mercenary infantry. The permanent corps of the border defense became the unit where the new weaponry and tactics were first introduced to be tested and learned. It also became the prime school of military command for the Polish aristocracy.

Robert Frost promotes a thesis of the Polish adoption of military innovations from the West by the Polish aristocrats travelling there for education and leisure. He underestimates the lessons that the Polish soldier nobles learned fighting in the Ukraine, the steppe frontier, increasingly the prime region of the Polish fighting commitment from the end of the 15th century. Brian Davies admits that “Russia’s military conflict with the Crimean Khanate […] exerted as much impact on Russian military reform as the empire’s wars with Poland-Lithuania, Livonia, and Sweden,” but Robert Frost does not consider the same for Poland. However, Poland did not have a large conflict in the West after the last third of the 15th century besides the dynastic quarrel in Bohemia and Hungary.

Fig 4 The last stand of the Polish levy Its slaughtering by the Moldavian peasant militia in the Kozmin Forest in 1497 finished the levy’s fighting career Never again it composed the bulk of the Polish army and determined the course of campaigning.

The Russian Illustrated Anthological Chronicle of the Sixteenth Century. The Shumilov Volume, Moscow. The Russian National Library, J. 550. Courtesy of Runivers, Russia

Poland fought almost exclusively against the East. Aleksander Bołdyrew, a Polish historian, argues that due to the learning in the East, the smooth regularity of the Obrona Potoczna was used not for mastering the products of the Western military revolution, like its firearms and infantry squares, but the cavalry’s adoption of Tatar bow-shooting and loose melee.

The process was similar to the Western trend of lighter cavalry but with a different tactical reasoning. Contrary to the cavalry, the Polish mercenary infantry developed along West-European lines. Polish historians Tadeusz Grabarczyk and Jan Szymczak demonstrate that the Polish regular infantry was rearmed with advanced types of handguns and learned effective fighting techniques by the end of the 15th century.

The opposite directions of the military revolution for the Polish regular cavalry and infantry in the specific regional fighting conditions are stunning. They are similar to the Muscovite “orientalization” advocated by Vitaly Penskoy.

Formation of the Polish regular corps of the southern border defence together with the fortification of the Polish Galicia, Western Volhynia and Western Podolia, slowly made the military situation in the region suitable for its agricultural colonization and its connection to the Baltic trade of the grain and raw material exports to Western Europe by the rivers Western Bug and Vistula.

The enormous latifundia with an open border to the steppe were allotted to the Polish magnates who built their castles and raised their private armies to protect their possessions against the Tatars and police the peasants. The successes of the Polish regular troops against the Crimeans, like at Shavranka and Koperstin, alternated with debacles, such as those at Wiśniowec in August of 1594, and the levy’s results were dramatically worse.

Since the Crimean forces were able to engage and defeat the Polish and Lithuanian field armies, the distributed defense of fortified settlements became the main operational design against the Crimean raids. The distributed defense supported the fragmented body politic.

Since the Polish Galicia, Western Volhynia and Western Podolia, as well as Lithuanian Eastern Volhynia, the first objectives of the Tatar strikes were the regions of the vast magnate estates with private castles and towns, strengthening of the magnate private troops limited the royal ability to suppress the magnates and monopolize the war in the national territory.

The party of magnates, both in Poland and Lithuania, was empowered by their standing private armies, some of which were larger than the Polish regular corps of the border defense.

Brian Davies describes the Polish-Lithuanian frontier latifundia as being of two types, the grain-producing in the Western Rus (now-a-day Belarus), for export via the prospering Baltic trade, and cattle-ranching and taх-revenue in the South-Western Rus (contemporary north-western and central Ukraine).

Davies does not relate the two different kinds of magnate troops to two different kinds of magnate latifundia. But this relation looks probable, if the Baltic export latifundia were supporting the commissioned royal troops, magnate-raised companies on the royal service, and the Ukraine cattle-ranching and tax-revenue latifundia were supporting the private magnate troops acting on their own and together with the regional levy.

Both commitments of the magnate troops associated the magnates, as the certain socio-political strata of the Polish society, with the professional troops where the military innovations nestled. This interesting commitment was increasing, it determined the Polish way of the military revolution and model of the fiscal-military state. The submission of the gentry to the magnate-dominated centers of the local economy and territorial defense subordinated the gentry to the magnates who recruited it to their private troops and political factions. The trend was opposite to the situation in Western Europe where the gentry became the social base of the royal suppression of the feudal magnates and the formation of absolutism.

The latifundia economy and private magnate troops became the foundation of the Polish magnate body politics that directed the Polish merger of Lithuania in the second third of the 16th century and the colonization of the Ukraine in the last third of the 16th century. They also brought the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth into a civil war with its Ukrainian subjects in the first half of the 17th century.

The invasion of the southern Polish frontier by the regular professional armies of the cavalry and infantry with firearms was only one of the factors indicating the military revolution’s influence in this God-forsaken region that started to ascend to central geopolitical importance in Eastern Europe. In April of 1493, a few hundred of the fresh hireling troops of the Lithuanian Kievan governorate with a few hundred of the mercenary Tatar exiles stealthily followed the Crimean raiding party, returning from an incursion at Kiev, to the Crimean fort Tyagin at the river Dnieper’s crossing and overran the fort by surprise.

In the following Fall, the Lithuanian troops of the same composition attacked the Crimean-Ottoman fortress Ochakov (Özü) at the Dnieper-Bug Gulf. They sacked Ochakov’s downtown area and burned some Ottoman craft in its port (Table 1, Entry No 7). It was the hit-and-run cavalry raid of a comparatively minor scale without the employment of firearms or any innovative technique. Tactically it was a replica of the Tatar raids. Nevertheless, the Lithuanian assaults of 1493 on the Crimean and Ottoman facilities in the Northern Black Sea steppes became a demonstration of the Lithuanian military revival after the catastrophic sack and burn of Kiev by the Crimean army in 1482 and lost to Muscovy the protection rights over the polities in the river Oka’s upper reaches and the Principality of Tver in the 1480s.

The new hireling troops of the Kievan governorate became an important component of the Lithuanian military reform of the last third of the 15th century. The reform was run by the newly educated generation of Lithuanian administrative magnates who promoted the ideas of the military changes learned in Poland and Western Europe, and their inventions. It was focused on the build-up of the professional forces and rearrangement of the martial estate in Lithuania proper and its provinces in South-Western and Western Rus.

Ukrainian historian Natalia Yakovenko shows the reshaping of the East-Volhynian gentry according to the Polish pattern with the introduction of the Polish-style provincial legislative and levy. The East-Volhynian levy became the backbone of Lithuanian defense against the Crimean Khanate in the 16th century. However, the Polonization of the East-Volhynian gentry alienated it from the regional peasantry and townsfolk who adhered to their identity. In the 17th century, the rift ignited a civil war of the Commonwealth against its Ukrainian subjects.

In the steppe frontier that amounted to a third of Poland and half of Lithuania, contrary to the West European practice, it was not the royal armies but the provincial garrisons and field forces that became the faster learners of the military revolution. Lithuanian historian Gediminas Lesmaitis demonstrates that the frontier garrisons became the centers of the military changes including the establishment of the professional troops of the gentry, and the adoption of handguns, artillery, and modern fortifications.

Besides the reorganization of the levy and the gentry’s switch to the hire service, the Lithuanian reformers recruited the regular provincial troops among the elements marginal in the Medieval social stratification but ready to fight, soon named the Cossacks. They became especially important in Lithuanian Eastern Podolia and Kievan Land where after the Crimean devastation of the 1480s there were not gentry and only close vicinity of few the grand prince’s castles remained inhabited. The Lithuanian raid on the Crimean-Ottoman facilities in 1493 signified the emergence of the Dnieper Cossack military corporation that slowly climbed to become the major force in Eastern Europe in the 17th century and the armed backbone of the future Ukrainian nation.

Ukrainian scholar Sergiy Lep’yavko explains that the Dnieper Cossackdom emerged as a result of the mutation of the lower strata of South-Eastern Rus’ military estate, slugi, due to the specific needs of the territorial defense of the settled population against the Tatar raiding for slaves and spoil.

Contrary to Poland, in Lithuania not magnates but frontier commonfolk became associated with the firearms and professional troops.

Serhii Plokhy bounds the social and national process of the Cossackdom’s growth with the military revolution, in particular, the diffusion of firearms and learning of the tactics of fighting with them against mounted bowmen. Ukrainian scholar Boris Cherkas associates the socio-political lift of the Cossack corporation with their fighting successes against the Crimeans that they achieved using the firearms.

The Cossacks became the prominent force among other kinds of troops and martial groups in the Polish-Lithuanian frontier since the Cossacks’ social position and military competence pushed them from a traditional Polish-Lithuanian defensive stance onto the offensive. Sergiy Lep’yavko considers that the Cossackdom became the particular frontier community, the important part of “the Defensive Range” of Europe that safeguarded it against the Turkic-Muslim onslaught.

At the same time, Hans-Jürgen Bömelburg, a German scholar, claims that the Cossacks and Tatars composed “a market of violence” in the vast Northern Black Sea area, that was revolving around the raiding, banditry, spoil resale, slave trade and mercenary warfare .

The firearms were utilized in Eastern Europe, first of all, not by the troops of the centralizing governments, as in Western Europe, but the weakly controlled frontier bands and communities, a source of the devastation and instability which hindered the centralization.

The emergence of the Dnieper Cossackdom as the particular ethnic military stratum became one of the most important examples of the social and political consequences of the proliferation of firearms in Eastern Europe. It was very different from the rise of the urban “third class” that historians find in the military revolution in Western Europe. But its difference does not mean a lesser significance.

The rise of the Cossackdom with its specific recruitment base and fighting technique, and the development of the standing professional troops of the border defense remained the only available solution for Poland and Lithuania to keep their Ukrainian possessions and prevent the Crimeans from raiding and marauding as far as the Baltics.

The disastrous failure of the joint Polish-Lithuanian advance on the Ottoman holdings on the Northern Black Sea shore in 1497, with the slaughtering of the Polish levy in the Kozmin Forest and failure of the Lithuanian levy to move on the Crimea, was followed by the Ottoman marcher Beys’ invasion into Galicia, Western Volhynia and Southern Poland in 1498. In 1500, the Crimean transcontinental raid was launched across Eastern and Central Poland as far as Prussia and Lithuania proper, the new generous slave-extraction objective of the Crimeans.

The Polish and Lithuanian forces appeared unable to repel the new operational design of the Crimean Khanate in the steppes. It was the first stage of the forceful military changes of the Crimean Khanate, a nomadic successor of the Golden Horde. The Ottoman and Crimean raiding offensive of 1498 to 1500 and the Polish-Lithuanian fall back on the distributed defense of the garrisoned castles opened the two centuries long geopolitical contest over the civilizational adherence of the Northern Black Sea steppes (contemporary southern Ukraine and European Russia) to either the Turkic-Tatar Muslim or East-European Slavic Orthodox areas.

Combat set the order for the center and periphery

In the Early Modern Period, nation-building was both a social, economic, and demographic agenda, and a tactical issue. Some states were unable to resist aggression from outside and collapsed despite the perfect political programs of their rulers. In the initial years of the 1500s, most of Lithuania was burned down, devastated and depopulated by the Crimeans who raided around the Lithuanian capital, Wilno, and collected their spoil and slaves in the camps that they set in what is nowadays central Belarus. Muscovy, the Crimean ally, defeated the Lithuanian army in a major battle at the river Vedrosha in 1500 and annexed the eastern third of Lithuania.

Lithuania’s chances of survival looked bleak and its being split between its enemies, Muscovy and the Crimea, and its ally, Poland, looked more probable.

Fig. 5. The origin of the East-European wagon-camp (wagenburg, tabur, oboz) tactic Probably, it was the invention of the Lithuanian grand prince Vitovt, his synthesis of the Tatar nomadic cart barrier against the agile enemy, and Teutonic wagenburg as a field fortification. Vitovt introduced the wagon-camp in 1399 for his lost battle against the Golden Horde at the river Vorskla.

The Russian Illustrated Anthological Chronicle of the Sixteenth Century: The Second Osterman Volume, Moscow. The library of the Rus- sian Academy of Sciences, Jl. 613 06 Courtesy of Runivers, Russia.

In this unbearable situation on 5 August 1506, the Lithuanian army destroyed the large Crimean raiding corps at the town of Kletsk (Table 1, Entry No 9). The battle of Kletsk had huge military consequences. Polish historian Stanisław Herbst who is regarded in his country as a forerunner of the military revolution concept describes in detail in two of his works the design and use of the new Polish-Lithuanian tactic against the Crimean cavalry at Kletsk in 1506 and Lopushno in 1512. The interaction of the cavalry and handgunners in the wagon-camp, oboz, became its mainstay.

American historian Brian Davies demonstrates in his detailed study of the wagon-camp formations and tactics in Eastern Europe, that the wagon-camp gained its “significance in the fifteenth century when combined with the gunpowder revolution.” The sound Polish-Lithuanian victories over the Crimeans, Muscovites, and Moldavians, like the battles of Lopuszno 1512, Orsha 1514, Obertyn 1531, were achieved by the oboz deployment. It was also borrowed and utilized by the Muscovite army in its most important clashes with the Crimeans, like the battles of Sudbishchi in 1555 and Molodi in 1572. And the tactic of the oboz was professed by the Ukrainian Cossacks in their national revolt against Polish oppression in the middle of the 17th century.

The Russian and Ukrainian armies relied on the tactic of the oboz fighting together to repel the Polish and Ottoman invasions of Ukraine in the second half of the 17th century. It was the tactic of strategical warfare.

The Polish historian Marek Plewczyński describes the changes that the tactic of the oboz brought to the deployment of the Polish cavalry. The former linear array was dropped as ineffective and a new pattern was introduced that became known as the Old Polish array. Probably, it was first tried in the battles of Kletsk in 1506 and Lopuszno in 1512 together with the oboz.

The array was based on two principles that were similar to the organizational and tactical reforms of other European armies. The first one was the difference between the administrative units, the company, rota and choragiew in the Polish case, and the tactical unit, battalion, hufce. The Old Polish array consisted of four principal hufces, vanguard and main forces, and, a significant innovation, three lines of the reserve hufces on the array’s wings to maneuver the reserves in a fast and flexible manner according to the tactical situation.

Plewczyński also demonstrates the practical use of this array in the battle of Obertyn in 1531 and explains how the tactic of the Old Polish array was effective against the enemy superior in numbers and mobility. It was the array that provided the conditions for flexibility and assault.

Soon it became clear that the deployment of oboz and the Old Polish array were also imperative. On 2 August 1519, the joint Polish and Lithuanian army that gathered to counter a major Crimean raid was annihilated at the town of Sokal (Table 1, Entry No 11). The Polish-Lithuanian army consisted totally of cavalry because the Polish standing corps of the border defense, with its infantry of handgunners, field artillery and wagon-camps, was swept aside by the Crimeans when they ravaged the vicinity of Lublin and Lvov.

The defeat of Sokal was a sour reminder to the Poles and Lithuanians that the cavalry of the Central-European type, including the professional units, was inferior to the cavalry of the East-European type, Crimean, Turkish, Muscovite, in combat of maneuver with remote fighting, due to the latter’s superiority in bow-shooting and tactical flexibility.

Brian Davies states that “the royal castles could not play an important role in frontier defence strategy [of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth]. There were too few of them, especially in the eastern half of Ukraine.” And the small wooden forts with two to three guns which were built to provide a shelter for the locals “could not dominate the territory.” The actions of the field forces were essential, but the the standing corps of the border defence, Obrona Potoczna was too small to seal the southern boundary of Galicia and Western Podolia, especially after Poland’s merger with Lithuania and incorporation of Eastern Podolia and the Kievan Land into the Polish Crown in 1569.

And the levy, as the battle of Sokal again confirmed, was ineffective on its own. Sergiy Lep’yavko and Aleksander Bołdyrew reveal that Polish war-planning Lvov Rule was introduced on 28 April 1520 by the Polish Sejm in Toruń (Thorn) learning the lessons of the Sokal defeat.

It was the innovatory operational regulation of campaigning that established the border defense in three lines, the forefront scouts, mobile units against the minor Crimean parties in the middle and the main body of the permanent corps deep in the rear.

The Polish and Lithuanian forces needed a tactic to operate in the vast territory almost without the stationary fortification and they adopted the wagon-camp tactic and Old Polish array as imperative. The permanent corps, with its handgun infantry, field artillery and wagon-camp, together with the emergency gentry levy of the regions in peril was capable of engaging a large Crimean force in case of a bigger invasion.

Robert Frost considers that the Polish operational arrangement to leave the borderlands to their doom and fall back to protect the inner provinces was the smarter solution than the hypothetic system of the bastion-style fortifications in the borderlands that the Commonwealth abstained from creating.

This conclusion requires a comparative estimation. Why were the defensive clusters of fortresses established in Royal Hungary against a similar enemy, the Ottomans with their mostly cavalry armies and frontier raiders? And why were the chain of fortresses connected by the defensive lines implemented along the Muscovite frontier against the same enemy, the Crimeans? It seems the Commonwealth’s operational plan was not an elaborated solution but dictated by the outcome of fighting events similar to the Sokal debacle of 1519. In other words, the Commonwealth was pressed into the operational plan of the Lvov Rule by the Crimean military superiority. And maybe the Commonwealth simply did not care about the frontier territories due to their social specificity.

If Galicia, Western Volhynia and Western Podolia in Poland and Eastern Volhynia in Lithuania had the numerous szlachta it was virtually absent in Eastern Podolia and the Kievan Land. The Republic of Nobles was obliged to protect its noble fellows but could have abandoned the people of a lower sort. In the former provinces, the szlachta composed the levy for self-defence, in the latter provinces the levy was absent. The Commonwealth delegated the defense of Eastern Podolia and the Kievan Land to the forces of colonizing magnates and the local militia.

Sergiy Lep’yavko sees the consequences of the battle of Sokal and Lvov Rule as the historical window of opportunities for the Dnieper Cossackdom because the rising strata of the Cossacks composed the bulk of both sets of troops, the magnate bands and militia. It also composed the royal register that garrisoned royal castles. The boundaries between the categories were absent and all of them smoothly moved from the mercenary service to banditry in the steppes to initiative raiding of the Tatar and Ottoman neighbors to rioting against the Polish-Lithuanian frontier magnates. Ukrainian “cossackized burghers and peasants” amply fed the Cossack community with zealous recruits. In this marginal social-military pocket, the community of Cossackdom had consolidated and the self-consciousness of the Ukrainian nation emerged.

The Polish-Lithuanian royal authorities facilitated the consolidation of the Cossack strata by hiring it for their ventures in Muscovy, wars against Sweden in the Eastern Baltic and the Ottoman Empire in Moldavia. Soon the Cossack militia became a warrior corporation with its own social, religious and national objectives. Brian Davies states that “the idea of a Ruthenian nation rooted in the Orthodox faith and protected by a free Cossack knighthood.” It integrated the Cossacks, peasants, townsfolk and petty nobles of the Commonwealth’s central Ukrainian lands into a proto-nation during the 17th century. The importance of the Dnieper Cossackdom for the coagulation of the Ukrainian nation supports the thesis of the military causation of the formation of modern nations. But in this case, it happened not via a habitual bureaucratic erasure of the provincial diversity but by the militant ethnic consolidation.

Bołdyrew and his co-author Karol Łopatecki explain that two major “meanders of the Polish Military Revolution” followed the defeat of Sokal. Creating “a unified, in terms of weaponry, light cavalry[…] in the 1540s and 50s,” capable of engaging the Tatars with bow-shooting and maneuver combat was the first reform. And “the internal standardization of cavalry units” into the armored lance hussaria and light bow-shooting cavalry during the same period was the second. Bołdyrew and Łopatecki emphasize that “neither commanders-in-chief nor political and governmental factors […] played a key role in the tactical innovation [but] mid-level commanders.” Bołdyrew and Łopatecki advocate a Polish military revolution “from beneath,” in a way allegedly different from the Dutch and Swedish form on the one hand and the Muscovite on the other.

The result was of a military that was efficient but politically perilous in nature, the battlefield-perfect troops based on the expertise of the gentry soldiers and magnate commanders that became the social compound where political mutiny fermented. Historians don’t look for the potential of the famous Polish militant magnate-szlachta confederations that opposed the royal authority or Sejm’s majority in this specific state-private partnership which became the Polish army of the 16th to 17th centuries. However, it nestled right there.

The Muscovite political system reacted to the shock of the stunning Crimean fighting capability in the first decades of the 16th century in a completely different way. On 28 July to 12 August 1521, the Muscovite duty cavalry corps was destroyed at the river Oka crossings near the town of Kolomna (Table 1, Entry No 12). The joint Crimean and Kazan armies advanced on Moscow and devastated the vicinity of the city. Russian historian Vladimir Zagorovsky considers that the Muscovite strategy to prevent the Crimeans from raiding the Muscovite heartland by maneuvering the cavalry along the Oka was at fault.

The Crimean forces were much faster than the Muscovite cavalry which was distributed to a few divisions to guard the most dangerous approaches. If the coming invasion was not detected beforehand and its point correctly predicted, the separated divisions were doomed and Moscow was endangered. It was clear that the Oka’s bank must have been strengthened. The construction of the stationary defensive line started along it in the aftermath of the Muscovite debacle at Kolomna in 1521. The chain of formidable fortresses became its backbone.

The ranges between them were protected with earth-timber forts at the key locations and barriers denying the Oka’s crossing to the Crimean cavalry. The construction of the defensive line along the Oka required three new major competencies from the Muscovite government. They were the large-scale mobilization of men and resources for the building works, learning of the terrain, engineering and weaponry expertise, and establishment of the infantry and artillery to defend the line. It was a conjunction of military reforms, administrative development and resource mobilization.

This Muscovite line did not receive proper attention from the scholars studying the military revolution in Russia. Vitaly Penskoy and Richard Hellie describe the Oka bank as the terrain of the semi-standing cavalry’s deployment. Marshall Poe does not pay his attention to it in his two well-known essays on the military revolution in Russia although the prime focus of his narrative is on the Muscovite bureaucratic autocracy to which the tremendous venture of the defensive lines’ construction is likely attributed.

Carol B. Stevens linked two important innovations to the Muscovite fortified line along the Oka: technical, through the introduction of firearms, and tactical, through the adoption of the wagon-camp array. Besides the deployment of the central cavalry army over there, the government hired the free local men and marginals adept with firearms to garrison the border fortifications and patrol the frontier. It was the practice that truly revolutionized the Muscovite warfare because the Muscovite gunpowder army was brought up from the governmental taming and enlisting of the frontier social groups that were self-minded but professed the firearms. Stevens emphasizes that the Muscovite steppe defense was the “centrally organized effort,” the reason why it was “increasingly efficient” in comparison with the Polish-Lithuanian steppe defense as laid out by the Lvov Rules.

Brian Davies establishes his concept of Muscovy’s imperial development on the construction of the defensive lines in the 17th century, first of all, Belgorod Cherta, but does not provide much research on its early forerunner, the Oka’s Bereg. However, it is reasonable to suppose that it was the enterprise of the Bereg’s construction and defense, between other pages of history, where the “Muscovite state had already developed three powerful instruments for resource mobilization and social control” by the time to begin its biggest venture of the sort, the Belgorod Cherta in the 1630s. They are “a complex hierarchy of state service obligations […]; this liturgical regime of compulsory state service,” central bureaucratization and effective local administration. And forth, self-administration of the local communities allowed the low-level initiative especially important for colonization and expansion, but always under strict central supervision.

It seems that two successful Crimean ventures, in Polish and Lithuanian Volhynia in 1519 and at the Oka and Moscow in 1521, created the military situation that determined the position of the private military initiative and central military control in Poland and Muscovy.

Together with other events, they dictated the loose political constitution of Poland and rigid political constitution of Muscovy. They also paved the special path for the military revolution’s impact on the socio-political affairs in Eastern Europe. If in North-Western and North-Central Europe the military innovations emerged mainly in the central armies from which they influenced the political center of the states, in Eastern Europe they emerged in the frontier and influenced the political center through peripheral warfare. Not many scholars account for this East-European particularity, Géza Pálffy and Gabor Agoston track it for the Hapsburgs and Ottomans, and Brian Davies emphasizes it for Muscovy.

The discourse on the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth is still gravitating toward the study of the Sejm’s affluent debates and magnate polemic opuses. However, when we study the military revolution in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth we have to be very careful with the unitary notion “Polish-Lithuanian,” because in such a complicated matter as military revolution the separate Lithuanian and Prussian, emerging Ukrainian and subtle Belarussian versions existed. And the Polish center substantially differed from the frontier. The Polish-Lithuanian military revolution was not so integral behind the Polish central façade as many historians present, vice versa it was critically disintegrated.

The difference between the central and peripheral emergence of the military innovations could have been important because it was much harder for the peripheral impacts to transform the central mainstay of the state than for the central mutations to diffuse into the porous periphery. The peripheral origin of the military innovations had a mightier potential for political and social conflicts.

It was the frontier affairs and especially frontier warfare from where the heaviest national crisis befell Muscovy in the first decades and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the middle of the 17th century. The crisis came to both realms from the Ukraine, a vast common Polish-Lithuanian-Muscovite frontier from the lower Volga to the lower Danube. In brief, it could be denoted as the chain of the upheavals during the 17th century, from the Muscovite storm of the tsar-impostors and the “peasant war” of Ivan Bolotnikov to the Ukrainian “national revolution” of Bohdan Khmelnitsky in the Commonwealth. The frontier communities and bands “took advantage of the era of political instability in order to transform the central areas of the neighboring states, on a short-term basis, into structures akin to markets of violence.” Muscovy was able to get through this crisis but the Commonwealth was not.

It was an important species of the East-European stage of civil war that it unfolded as a conflict primarily not between the broader society and political regime or different social groups and political institutions, but as the conflict between the center and frontier wherein the new aggressive social strata and ethnic groups, political and military structures were packed. Remarkably, this crisis is of low interest to scholars of the military revolution but it was the centerpiece of Marxist studies on the Early Modern transformation of Muscovy and Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, that is nowadays ignored. Studying the stage of civil war in the cycle of the military and socio-political transformation of Eastern Europe requires resurrecting their rich narratives.

Firearms shape societies for the longue durée

Firearms were presented in Eastern Europe in the 15th century and are discernible in most of the military events that are addressed in Table 1. In some military events, their absence was no less vital than their presence in others, for example, the Polish and Muscovite inability to deploy firearms in the battles of Sokal in 1519 and Kolomna in 1521, respectively, allowed the decimation of the Polish levy and Muscovite cavalry by Crimean bow-shooting. The firearms helped, but only by helping Muscovy subjugate the Novgorodian Republic and Kazan Khanate. But it was the superior Muscovite mobilization, campaign planning and increasing capability of the traditional forces that determined the outcome of both conflicts.

Fig. 6 and 7. Coming of the Muscovite siege artillery. The river-born guns that were both shipped for the construction of the land batteries and installed onboard for the deck-to-shore fire saved Muscovite amphibious infantry from the total annihilation by the Tatar cavalry sortie during the Muscovite siege of Kazan in 1506.

The Russian Illus trated Anthological Chronicle of the Sixteenth Century, The Shumilov Volume, Moscow The Russian National Library. JL. 657 06, and JL. 661. Courtesy of Runivers, Russia.

When the Polish levy host advanced on Moldavia and the Ottoman onshore possessions at the port-fortresses of Akkerman and Chilia in 1497, the numerous mercenary infantry and large artillery train accompanied it.

The infantry contained 60 percent of the men equipped with the rucznice, the early type of the soon to be widespread arquebus, with a handy butt and S-shaped ignition lock. The artillery park included 40 big and medium and 100 small guns of different types and functions, including wall-crushing guns and field antipersonnel pieces as well as two giant bombards.

However, when the Polish host was slain in the Kozmin Forest by the Moldavian court troops and peasant militia with the assistance of the Crimean and Ottoman units, the light cavalry and infantry without firearms, the Polish formidable gunpowder weaponry were more a burdens than a help.

The total slaughter of the disorganized levy crowds was prevented by the valiant stance of the standing border defense corps and counter-charge of the Polish regular court cavalry.

It was not beyond the East-European rulers to purchase and produce firearms in abundance and supply them to the troops, but the expertise of the employment of the troops with firearms was almost absent. In the 15th century, the view of the importance of firearms remained on the level that they might have brought occasional victories in a combat or two but they did not secure strategical superiority.

It is not surprising that the breakthrough of firearms on the strategic scene happened in the Eastern Baltic, the most advanced region of Eastern Europe where the most technocratic and fanatic governments ruled over the theocratic Teutonic Order and Livonian Order. In 1500, when Lithuania was beaten unconscious by the Crimea and Moscow, it was the Livonian Order that moved ahead to maintain the strategic balance in Eastern Europe.

On 13 September 1502, the Livonian army fought to a standstill a superior Muscovite force at Lake Smolino on the border of Muscovite Pskov and Livonia (Table 1, Entry No 8). The battle of Smolino happened soon after three great Muscovite victories over the Lithuanian army with the Polish mercenary component, battles at the river Vedrosha on 14 July 1500 and Mstislavl on 4 November 1501, and the conquest of the Severa region (North-East of contemporary Ukraine) in May to August 1500. It followed the scandalous debacle of the Muscovite army in the battle of the river Seritsa on 27 August 1501 against the Livonians.

The course and outcome of the Seritsa and Smolino battles became a grim disappointment to the Muscovite strategists. It demonstrated the Muscovite semi-standing territorial cavalry’s fighting inefficiency in the face of the West- and Central-European tactical innovation of the “pike and shot” infantry array and its interaction with the heavy shock cavalry. The Muscovite cavalry’s maneuver and bow-shooting superiority were not sufficient to rout the staunch enemy that was able to repel the strike by the use of firearms and pike and deliver deadly counter-attacks with armored lancers.

It was the allied stance of the Livonian Order at Seritsa and Smolino and the capability of its mercenary army that saved Lithuania from complete collapse in 1500 to 1503. Tactically the battle of Smolino was not a Livonian landslide but was strategically a grievous setback for Muscovy. In the years of deadly Lithuanian weakness when the Lithuanian army almost did not exist, the best Muscovite forces were nailed to Livonia and partly destroyed there. The Muscovite design on Lithuania foreseeing its elimination and appropriation of all Lithuanian Rus was not accomplished.

The battle of Smolino demonstrated that in the period of fast, sharp and multi-directional military changes at the end of the 15th to the beginning of the 16th centuries, the Muscovite model of state-sponsored reforms was lagging behind the pace of innovations that were introduced by the mercenary-oriented military reforms in Western and Central Europe. “At the turn of the fifteenth century, the Muscovite court elite found itself in possession of forces quite different from and in some ways inferior to contemporary European armies,” Marshal Poe declares. “At about the same time that Western courts were building large pike- and shoulder-armed infantry forces supported by artillery, the Muscovites continued to rely on lightly armed horse.” Besides the tactical awkwardness, the cavalry of the territorial companies that were built in Muscovy in the last third of the 15th century was turning out to be socially cumbersome.

It was coagulating into the estate corporation sticking to a particular kind of warfighting of the large cavalry masses of bowmen and swordsmen. The Muscovite territorial cavalry and government joined in awkward tandem when the tactical development of the cavalry required the government to push and the government was politically over-dependent on the provincial service class to give that push. Instead of the West-European constant progress in weaponry and tactics, the Muscovite military development fell into stagnation demanding a political upheaval for the impulse to change.

In the narrative of Russian historian Yury Alekseev, the battle of Smolino called for a correction in Muscovite military development. The Muscovite cavalry and its tactics needed to be refreshed with the techniques of the gunpowder revolution. Alekseev does not come exactly to this conclusion, however Vitaly Penskoy, referring to the “experience of the fighting against Livonians,” and Richard Hellie pointed out that it was exactly the case.

The corps of handgunners, pishchalniki was established in 1508 in response to the Muscovite “defeat at the hands of Livonians… that was attributed to the Livonians’ abundance of the firearms.” Michael Paul looks far ahead, “the first steps were being taken which would lead to a modern infantry-based army in Russia.” However, in the battle of Smolino, the Muscovites met not only the massed infantry with handguns but also the mercenary landsknecht pike column, something never seen before. It appeared very effective against the Muscovite cavalry charge.

The Muscovites were also countered by the Order’s wagenburg with the field artillery as the defensive array, something that was widely known in Eastern Europe but had not been utilized against the Muscovite forces before. Why did the Muscovites adopt the infantry with handguns in a couple of years, adopt the wagon-camp with the field artillery in a couple of decades, and adopt the pike columns almost a couple of centuries later?

From the point of view of the fighting equipment and technique, the pike columns were simplest to reproduce and the wagon-camp was simpler to reproduce than the troops of the handgunners, because both the former had more in common with the traditional Rus-Muscovite military and warfare than the latter.

The advocates of the Muscovites’ borrowing from the Livonian experience also do not explain why the Muscovite did not borrow the Swedish pattern of professional infantry with handguns that they had met a few years earlier, in their siege of Vyborg in 1495 and the Swedish amphibious assault on Ivangorod in 1496. It is significant that the Muscovites started using the infantry with handguns not in field engagements, similar to the Livonians at Smolino, but in siege warfare.

It is more probable that the Muscovite development of handheld firearms was organic, and took place in the economically and socially advanced Muscovite north-western towns, while it was enhanced by fighting against the Czech and Silesian mercenary infantry with handguns that the Muscovites met in numbers when they rushed into Lithuania after the annihilation of the Lithuanian army in the battle of the river Vedrosha. The mercenaries managed to hold out most of the Lithuanian towns against the Muscovite offensive. The impression of their efficiency in fortress warfare was strong.

The need to reproduce the methods of the Swedish, German and Czech mercenary handgunners was absorbed by the Muscovites in their debacle at Kazan in 1506 when the Muscovite amphibious infantry dared to advance on the city without the support of the cavalry that lagged behind after marching overland.

It was the first Muscovite venture when the artillery was organized as a separate command. However, the artillery’s capability did not bring victory. The Muscovite infantry was slaughtered by the Kazan cavalry sortie and only minor groups of it survived sheltering in their foothold camp under the barrage of the ships’ guns. The Muscovite rulers hastily added together the impression taken from the Swedish, Livonian and Lithuanian infantries with the firearms and the availability of the skilled hangunners in the Muscovite north-western towns. It is interesting that Mikhail “Misyur” Munekhin, the co-author of the Muscovite idea of Translatio Imperii which defines Moscow as a “Third Rome,” was the official responsible for recruiting the first Muscovite handgunners in Pskov and probably their supply of firearms purchased in Livonia. They were deployed in fortress warfare, at the Lithuanian stronghold of Western Rus, Smolensk.

On 16 May to 1 August 1514 (the active phase from the beginning of July), the Muscovites launched their assault on Smolensk, the third in two years (Table 1, Entry No 10). It seems that the walls of Smolensk were reconstructed according to the gorodnya design only partly and mostly remained in keeping with the outdated palisade, tyn design. Vitaly Penskoy describes the siege as the showpiece of the Muscovite switch to firearms from formerly mainly cavalry armies.

The artillery became the intrinsic force of the Muscovite army and the infantry of handgunners was successfully introduced and tested in offensive warfare. The fall of Smolensk changed fortress war in Eastern Europe decisively. The artillery bombardment instead of the storm and starve-out became the main stratagem of fortress-taking. The size and diversity of the siege trains were steadily increasing. The complicated tactics of the artillery offensive on the town fortifications was born. It combined the action of wall-crushing guns, anti-personnel guns and bombards hitting the inner part of the fortress. The artillery offensive gained momentum in fortress wars in Eastern Europe.

However, three sieges of Smolensk in 1513 to 1514 and the close battle of Orsha in 1514, as well as the subsequent Polish-Lithuanian attack on Opochka in 1517 and Muscovite attack on Polotsk in 1518 also imposed another rule. The combination of the strong fortress garrison and artillery with the relief army became a fortress’ rule of survival. Jeremy Black points out that “fortifications were no substitute for a field army.

They could not win a war and in defence, they depended on supporting forces.” The fast strong relief army was a much more effective tool against the siege than any kind of fortification. In Eastern Europe, it could only be the cavalry army.

This operational design of the fortress defense fueled the numerical ascendance of the cavalry over infantry in Eastern Europe. The composition of the Muscovite handgun infantry first tested in the taking of Smolensk had important consequences for the social and political development of Muscovy.

It was the urban conscripted infantry that changed from the traditional medieval urban militia for two reasons. First, it was switched to the government’s salary and supply after its recruitment. And second, it was commanded by government-appointed leaders and not by the communal elders or elected chiefs, while its tactics, weaponry, organization, and objectives were determined by the Military Chancery.

We soon find a moment four decades later when the Muscovite handgun infantry became standing professionals but it always preserved its key property of a product of townsfolk origins. The Muscovite towns, with an all Muscovite autocratic reign in the mind of historians, never lost their military position. They kept it by supplying the personnel for the most technically advanced troops, the combat importance of which was steadily ascending.

The Poles and Lithuanians effectively used the infantry of handgunners in field warfare according to the tactical pattern that they found in the battle of Kletsk in 1506. It had been widely reproduced since the battle at Chocim (Hotin) in 1509. However, the first Polish-Lithuanian infantry achievement in the fortress war only came two decades later.

It seems the Poles and Lithuanians would not have surpassed the Kletsk pattern if they had not met another example employed against them. The Teutons were their teachers again in the last Polish-Teutonic war of 1519 to 1521. Similar to Vitaly Penskoy’s estimation of the Muscovite Smolensk campaigns of 1513 to 1514, Stanisław Herbst regards that war “as a breakthrough in the history of our military, as the Polish equivalent of what a bit earlier started to take place in Italy.”

This conflict, strangely named a Reiterkrieg, War of Horsemen, was dominated by the “great marches of thousands of the mercenary Polish, Czech and German infantry.” The German and Czech infantries, which were contracted, turned out to be much more combat-effective than the Polish commissioned one.

It is a regret that historians one after another focus their attention on the events that presumably demonstrate some special ideological valiance, like the much chewed over battle of Orsha in 1514, instead of analyzing the events of high importance for military changes as Stanisław Herbst did.

The low fighting capability of the Polish infantry in the Reiterkrieg moved the Polish leaders to build up their infantry mostly of contracted mercenaries with their main pool hired in the German-speaking regions of the realm, Royal Prussia and Silesia. The discussion to introduce in Poland the native infantry by conscription from broad peasantry came to nought, and the conscripted infantry from the peasantry of the royal domain that tried to campaign against Muscovy in the 1570s was a disappointment. It was abandoned. The Polish infantry remained mercenary and alien, based either on foreigners or the non-Polish subjects of Poland.

This recruiting choice had long-running social and political consequences. In the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, only the towns of Royal Prussia preserved their military potential as the suppliers of mercenary handgunners of the German style and kept the political importance that was linked with the military potential.

The Muscovite towns’ representatives were important participants in the estate legislative and growing bureaucracy. At the same time, the proper Polish towns, as Maria Bogucka and Andrzej Janeczek show, were suppressed and reduced to total political negligence. When the stage of civil war came, the Muscovite towns by concerted action saved the country’s sovereignty from the Smuta and supported the political strength of the central government to implement a fiscal-military model including the elements of mercantilism.

Contrary to this picture, the Polish towns’ participation in the securing the outcome of the Polish civil war, Potop, was minor. The central government resurrected in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the last third of the 17th century was weak and magnate-dependent. It was unable to direct the country on the fiscal-military path, and the Polish economy remained the quasi-colonial appendix of the West-European Baltic Trade.

Warfare switched the social mutation to stagnation

It was important that Crown Hetman Jan Amor Tarnowski, the ideologist of Early Modern Polish infantry warfare, took part in the Reiterkrieg and after it befriended the Teutonic High Master then Duke of Prussia Albrecht. Tarnowski’s infantry experiments led to the first successful use of the Polish handgunners in the offensive fortress war. On 30 July to 29 August 1535, the Lithuanian and Polish forces sieged and took by storm the Muscovite fortress Starodub (Table 1, Entry No 13). Russian historian Mikhail Krom counterposes the Polish-Lithuanian siege of Starodub with the Muscovite siege of the Lithuanian fortress Mstislavl of similar architecture at the same end of July to the beginning of August of 1535.

The Muscovite army applied forces similar to the Polish-Lithuanian army at Starodub and launched a similar combination of artillery bombardment and storm. It overran Mstislavl’s downtown area but was unable to take its citadel. Krom states that the wall-crushing artillery of the Muscovites at Mstislavl and Poles-Lithuanians at Starodub were similarly low in effectiveness.

After they had not achieved substantial destruction of the fortifications using artillery, the Muscovites dropped their siege and left Mstislavl. But the Poles switched to mining and achieved the breakthrough. Krom as well as Polish historians Marek Plewczyński and Leszek Podhorodecki demonstrate that the Starodub campaign was an exemplar of the integration of the Western military knowledge with local fighting practice in Eastern Europe. Plewczyński and Podhorodecki relate that Tarnowski had beforehand hired two Italian engineers skilled in mining, and found the commander who knew how to integrate the blowing-up of the ramparts with its storming, Andrew Herburt, a Pole and former mercenary captain in France and Germany.

The course of the storming of Starodub displayed Tarnowski’s skillful use of the wagon-camp, his favorite field deployment, as well as the infantry, the troops of his special care. The gunpowder technique either the artillery or mining seemed of being lesser important. However, the legend of Starodub’s taking with the mine blast attracted the attention of the generals and military engineers in Eastern Europe to the use of this mining technique. It was utilized in the region in combination with the wall-crushing artillery up to the end of the 17th century.

The outcome of the Starodub siege reminded the fortification architects of the importance of the outer defenses to deny the assailants immediate access to the citadel. Starodub’s outer fortifications were burned down by the Lithuanian raiding party a year before, in 1534, and were not reconstructed by the time of the siege of 1535. Probably the cavalry raiders managed to burn them down because they were of simple lumber construction, tyn, similar to Kazan’s outer defenses burned by the Muscovites in 1530. The fortresses’ outer defenses must have been substantially strengthened to prevent this kind of misfortune from happening.

It was also important to harden the fortifications against the mining and provide them with low loopholes just over the foot of the wall to decimate the storming columns by ball and grape shots. All three challengers were met with a new kind of fortification construction, tarasa in the Russian siege lexicon, possibly after Italian terrazza (see comment below).

On the besiegers’ side, the taking of Starodub emphasized the importance of the well-protected storm array. Tarnowski is often credited for his wagon-camp array in the battle of Obertyn in 1531, however, his wagon-camp at Starodub deserves more attention. Tarnowski’s solution to advancing on the fortress with the wagon-camp was not exclusive, as the Muscovite generals had attempted it on Kazan in 1524 using the wagon-camp array. Tarnowski’s tactic again demonstrated how the wagon-camp was the regional specie of the field formation of the infantry with handguns similar to the West-European variation of the pike-and-shot columns.

Aleksander Bołdyrew does not mention the technique of the infantry pike push in the storming of Starodub in 1535, however, he observes its use by the Polish infantry under Tarnowski in the campaigns against Moldavia in 1531 and 1538. It is reasonable to imagine that the Polish success against the Muscovite sorties from Starodub was achieved by Tarniowsky’s masterly combination of the wagon-camp using pike-and-shot tactics. Bołdyrew concludes that “the specific gunpowder revolution that took place in the infantry, in the scale of the entire [Polish] army, was probably a marginal phenomenon” due to the numerical, tactical and social predominance of the cavalry.

He does not address the Starodub campaign in his conclusion, although the gunpowder technique and infantry action were decisive at Starodub. Vitaly Penskoy looks at Tarnowski’s combination of artillery assault and underground mining at Starodub as the property of the gunpowder revolution, and its influence on siege tactics.

Penskoy considers that the advanced gunpowder tactics of Tarnowski crashed the backward Muscovite fortifications deprived of important frontal outer defenses. He concludes that the Muscovite military architects learned nothing from the fall of Starodub and the Muscovite fortresses remained vulnerable due to their neglect of the bastion design in the second half of the 16th century and later.

Explaining the siege of Starodub according to Pavel Rappoport’s and Nikolay Kradin’s view it is striking that the weight of the besiegers’ fire shifted from the upper part of the walls on which it was focused centuries before, to the foot of the walls. It was the foot of the walls where Tarnowski made the breach for the storm with his guns and mines, the traditional scaling over the walls was the second technique for him. The learning of the lessons of the fall of Starodub substantially pushed ahead East-European fortress architecture. The change of the wooden fortifications to stone was not the prime solution.

Rappoport and Kradin agree about the difference between the gorodnya style of fortifications that dominated before the fall of Starodub and tarasa style that was implemented after it. The gorodnya wall was the chain of wooden frames filled with clay and pebbles, while tarasa was the uninterrupted construction of outer and inner walls connected by intersections and also filled with clay and pebbles. It was much more difficult to rupture the latter kind of construction by wall-crushing artillery or mine blast than the former kind that was vulnerable in the frames’ conjunctions.

Additional improvements to the tarasa wall construction included the hole sectors in the wall ranges while the gorodnya sections were filled with clay and pebbles entirely. The hole sectors were used to arrange the low loopholes for the guns and most of the defensive gunfire was moved from the top of the walls to their foot cancelling out the unaffected zones near the walls.

The fortifications of the tarasa design also became the new solution for the frontal outer defenses of the East-European fortresses instead of weak lumber tyn. All in all, it seems the tarasa style was an improvement on the gorodnya wooden fortifications similar to the Dutch-style improvement of the trace italienne in Western Europe or the famous Hungarian palanka design. Another effective solution against the gunpowder-charged offensive was found in the change of the functions of the fortress towers. Before the Starodub siege, the prime function of the towers was to support the defenders on the wall-top between them. After it the towers were mowed ahead, in front of the wall line, to provide flanking fire along the walls’ foot.

The siege of Starodub stands as the event with the most architectural, engineering, weaponry and tactical influence on siege warfare and fortress architecture in Eastern Europe. Its lessons diffused fast, as only 15 years later at Kazan the Muscovites met most of them which had been well-learned.

Mikhail Krom describes the discussion on military matters, strategical, organizational, and technical, in letters between Tarnowski and two other prominent military thinkers of the time in Eastern Europe, namely the duke of Prussia Albrecht and Lithuanian chancellor Olbracht Gasztołd on the eve of the Starodub campaign. It seems the Starodub War was a fighting part of the wider military and political changes in Poland and Lithuania.

Robert Frost, Vitaly Penskoy, Belarusian historian Genadz Saganovich and Lithuanian historian Edvardas Gudavičius focus their respective attention on the Lithuanian Statutes of 1529, which was the first detailed Lithuanian regulation of the gentry’s military service. Its mobilization in Lithuania became as rigorous as the mobilization of the territorial cavalry in Muscovy.

The Statutes also determined the landowning nobility’s obligation to field the retinue according to the number of peasant households in their estates and requirements for the weaponry and equipment of the gentry and its retainers.

Robert Frost and Belarusian historian Vladimir Picheta also point out the reform of the Lithuanian grand prince’s domain, parallel to the nationwide introduction of the Statutes. The reform sharply changed the domain’s structure, enserfed its peasants and transformed them into compulsory labor in the market-oriented manorial farms.

The reform quadrupled the domain’s revenue and made the obligation of its administrators onsite much clearer and stricter. Vitaly Penskoy reveals that the infantry with spears and handguns, and cavalry of the Polish type that the administrators of the royal domain estates were obliged to provide became a Lithuanian step to a national standing army.

The introduction of the Statutes and domain reform prepared the effective participation of the Lithuanian army in the Starodub campaign and larger campaigning in the last third of the 16th century. However, for all their difference, the new regulation of the gentry’s mobilization and rearrangement of the grand prince’s domain looked similar to the Muscovite process that Richard Hellie neatly defines as the “enserfment and military change.”

Lithuanian scholar Gediminas Lesmaitis demonstrates that the needs of the Starodub War initiated the nationwide fiscal reform in Lithuania. Lesmaitis, referring partly to the data used by Polish historian Ludwik Kolankowski, shows that the harsher fiscal arrangement afforded to employ a few thousand of the Polish mercenaries and local hirelings in the standing units. Kolankowski agrees with the conclusion of the Muscovite Chronicles that the mining, unsought before in Muscovy, was the main reason for the fall of Starodub. Lesmaitis comes to different and broader conclusions. He argues that the Starodub War pushed Lithuania into a substantial rearrangement of its army and political constitution.

Lesmaitis connects fiscal reform with the emergence of the native professional army. Since the Starodub War, the employment of the professional army was not extraordinary but ordinary with the function of the round-the-year service contrary to the seasonal service of the levy. Another important step was the naturalization of the Lithuanian professional forces. If before the Starodub War the Polish contracted mercenary corps was a self-contained part of the Lithuanian army often out of Lithuanian control, since then the Polish mercenaries became commissioned and more closely integrated into the Lithuanian army. The importance of the Polish mercenaries was further obscured by the Lithuanian hirelings. In Lesmaitis’s interpretation, Tarnowski’s mining and storm techniques at Starodub were minor details in the major reform of the Lithuanian army that brought Lithuania victory in the Starodub War.

Aleksander Bołdyrew discusses the aftermath of the siege of Starodub to argue for his model of the Polish military revolution. Bołdyrew considers that it gained advanced weaponry and made tactical achievements but it was devoid of political transformation. The retreat of the Polish army after the spectacular taking of Starodub due to the scarcity of funds for the soldiers’ salaries demonstrated the Polish failure to find a fiscal-administrative solution to settle war spending. Bołdyrew sees the reason for the failure in the specific political constitution of the Polish Republic of Nobles and the inability of the weak royal power and bureaucracy to take over the Polish government from the grab of the nobility. Later we address this typical look at the Polish political regime. Bołdyrew condemns Poland, although the Starodub War was Lithuania’s enterprise and the Polish corps of Tarnowski was a mercenary part of the Lithuanian army.

The Lithuanian political regime before the Starodub War was fluid, and the Starodub War secured the changes that had accumulated during a couple of preceding decades, most of which were either borrowed from Poland or produced by the Polonophil magnates. However, Lithuania adopted from Poland not a sterile political constitution but a live arrangement in a process of change that also tended to stagnation.

The Starodub War and other campaigns of the first third of the 16th century revealed the growth of the military importance of the broad Polish gentry, szlachta, in three dimensions. The first dimension, due to the recruitment of the native Polish commissioned cavalry exclusively from szlachta and the appointment to all command positions in the commissioned infantry from szlachta, the szlachta strengthened its position as the monopolistic agent responsible for coercion and violence.

The second dimension, due to the szlachta’s monopoly in the decision-making regarding taxes and allocation of the state revenues in the Sejm, the szlachta secured the position to control the build-up of standing forces, like the corps of the southern border defense, and emergency professional forces for larger campaigns, like Jan Tarnowski’s troops for the campaigns against Moldavia and Muscovy. In 1535, the Sejm in Piotrków declared the immediate revision of all royal property and spending of the treasury and established the commission to supervise that property. It managed to triple the domain’s revenue between 1533 to 1569. Most of the revenue increase was spent to support the professional forces.

The szlachta’s revision of the royal domain became an important source of the Polish mobilization of resources to war outside of civil society but under its control.

The third dimension of the growing importance of the szlachta consisted in the arrangement according to which the magnates and middle szlachta that served as the captains and subalterns in the professional commissioned cavalry and infantry bore a substantial share of the mobilization and campaign cost in return for social esteem, treasury compensation and war spoils.

The szlachta’s private military spending are an important example of the mobilization of the society’s resources for war outside of royal power.

The mobilization of the resources for war could have been more diversified than the “classic” absolutist vertical of the compulsion or unwilling bargaining under absolutist pressure. This was the Polish way until the Partitions of Poland at the end of the 18th century. It was effective at last during the 17th century.

Marshall Poe finds two important social results of the military revolution. The first of them was the transformation of former “cavalry nobility” into officers of the new model armies and royal administrators.

The establishment of the estate representative institutions to vote for the increasing tax collection was the second one. Both of them were achieved through the Polish military-social transformation but in a roundabout way and secured as such by the Starodub War.

The Polish and Lithuanian legislation concurrent to the Starodub War supports the observation that some of the military events worked as the impulse to political mutation and some of them worked to deny the further changes.

The stagnation of the political structures within the frame of the mobilization and organization of forces became perilous in the epoch of civil wars, ongoing in the 17th century when societies were changing in a fast, strong and vicious manner.

The social paradigm and political regime were ripped apart and if the military patterns were on the side of the outdated political regime they were crushed and wasted away together with it.

Or if society had been unable to do that, society itself would have perished. It is the property of the military revolution that the competitive international nature of warfare rarely afforded stagnation.

Military changes initiated an uneven and combined development

The next impulse of transformation came to Eastern Europe from where it was least expected. The nomadic societies are normally considered the victims of the military revolution, casualties of the military changes of the settled nations in the Early Modern Period that sharply turned the table of fighting superiority to the advantage of the latter. The borrowing of some settled armies’ innovations like gunpowder weapons is the only credit that the nomads deserve.

Fig. 8. The strategic chance for the Cossackdom. The Crimean landslide over the com- bined Polish-Lithuanian army at Sokal in 1519 opened the Commonwealth’s Ukraine for the deep manoeuvre warfare. The new strategic situation changed the Polish army. especially its cavalry, and stipulated the rise of the commonfolk Cossack militia.

The Russian Illustrated Anthological Chronicle of the Sixteenth Century: The Shumilor Vol- ume, Moscow The Russian National Library, Jl. 814 06. Courtesy of Runivers, Russia

Stephen Morillo, Jeremy Black, and Paul Lococo guess in their textbook: “the synthesis of cannon and cavalry was based in social and political structures that not only were traditional but remained largely untransformed by the military synthesis.” The nomadic military changes look in the historiography like a double dead-end of the military revolution, because nomads were able neither to generate the military change nor use the borrowed military changes for their own socio-political transformation. No doubt, the nomads thought in a completely different way on 30 to 31 July 1541 when the huge Crimean army came at the fords over the river Oka, on the bank opposite the Muscovite defensive line, bombarded it and dashed over it (Table 1, Entry No 14).

The battle of the Rostislavl fords had been preceded and was followed by the military reforms in the Crimean Khanate accomplished by Khan Sahib Geray. They had three points, of troop mobilization, deployment and fighting techniques. According to the Turco-Mongolian pattern, the Crimean army consisted of small standing court troops, nökers, and large nomadic militia. An imperial Russian historian Vasily Smirnov and prominent Turkish scholar Halil Inalcik are the most important authors who accentuate Sahib Geray’s restriction on nomadism that transformed the Crimean nomadic society into a military society of committed raiders.

The khan promoted the sedentary order of life, granting land allotments to the minor units of the Tatar tribes, aul, that became a military settlement, encouraging tillage by slaves. The auls switched the military preparation of their males from the nomadic routine to purposeful training and incessant campaigning. Crimean historian Ahmet-khan Sheykhumerov does not say that the settling of the nomadic militia changed the nature of the Crimean army from a federation of the nomadic tribes to the order of the military units-settlements.

But he remarks that it fuelled Crimean aggression in Eastern and Central Europe, Caucasus, Transcaucasia and Northern Iran at the turn of the 16th to 17th centuries.

Following Vasily Smirnov, Halil Inalcik analyses how the different military reforms of Sahib Geray influenced the social structure and political regime of the khanate, the kind of analysis that is fundamental to the concept of the military revolution. Inalcik’s studies on the proliferation of firearms in the Ottoman Empire and its impact on Ottoman society and administration significantly supplement his analysis of Sahib Geray’s reforms. Inalcik describes that the khan’s standing army was built on the Ottoman janissaries that were assigned to him, and reinforced with the local handgunners, tüfenkji, of the slave, kul, and hireling, tat, origin. The 1,000-man standing infantry of Sahib Geray was equipped with 200 fighting wagons and 60 light cannons to reproduce the Ottoman tactic of the wagon-camp, tabur.

Canadian historian Victor Ostapchuk finds in Sahib Geray’s reforms not only “the advantages over cavalry that fire by field-cannons and muskets gave,” but also “a vicious man-to-man sabre battle” as the technique of the new Crimean standing cavalry that it successfully used in combination with the gunpowder troops and wagon-camp against the Nogay mounted bowmen. Inalcik and Ostapchuk look at the new kinds of Crimean troops as the immediate reasons for Sahib Geray victories. The khan’s design to break the Muscovite’s defense at Rostislavl on the river Oka’s bank in 1541 was based on the massive canon and handgun fire delivered from the Crimean wagon-camp.

Vitaly Penskoy depicts the Crimean wagon-camp as the array where the firearms and standing troops were concentrated and (it is a variation of Penskoy’s view) isolated from the preponderant traditional nomadic cavalry of the Crimean military. Contrary to Penskoy, Halil Inalcik believes that Sahib Geray’s firearms and standing troops had “profound implications for the khanate.”

Sahib Geray was “one of the most powerful exponents of the idea of a centralized khanate in the Crimea.” Inalcik demonstrates how the khan transformed his traditional retinue of nökers into Ottoman-style salaried officials, and reformed the land-owning and financial arrangement of the khanate to maintain his new standing army. An American historian Carl Kortepeter points out that the khan’s standing corps obtained a dedicated recruiting source in the khan’s villages on the Northern Black Sea Shore outside of the tribal-engulfed Crimean Peninsula.

The build-up of the Crimean professional corps was supported by the special Ottoman fund. The works in Ottoman Kaffa supplied the corps with plenty of powder and the forges in the khanate’s capital of Bakhchysaray manufactured excellent handgun barrels. Kortepeter’s remarks supplement Inalcik’s research on the “diffusion of firearms” with the Ottoman-Crimean interaction. Inalcik, Kortepeter and Ostapchuk stop short of presenting Sahib Geray’s military model as the manifestation of the Crimean Khanate’s share in the gunpowder revolution similar to the Ottomans’ well-acclaimed participation.

However, the khan was overwhelmed by the conspiracy of the clan leaders after his patron, Sultan Suleyman I, deprived him of Ottoman support. The Ottomans opposed the Crimean khans’ autocracy, not in favor of the clan license but Istanbul control. The Crimean military reforms coincided with the consolidation of the Ottoman Northern Black Sea coast as the agricultural heartland of the manorial latifundia that were tilled by tens of thousands of Crimean-abducted slaves. Brian Davies considers that the slave supply became the new specialization of the Crimean Khanate in the Ottoman “division of labour” that required tighter Ottoman control over the khanate.

The incessant Crimean slave-raiding inclines a Polish scholar Andrzej Gliwa to regard Crimean warfare as being “unconventional,” “nonlinear,” “terrorist,” and a “hybrid” warfare of a weaker army against non-military objectives of much stronger opponents. An American scholar Brian Glyn Williams treats the Crimean military organization, weaponry and tactic as being “a product of thousands of years of steppe warfare, and […] differed little from those used by Attila and his Huns a millennium earlier.”

Anatoly Khazanov believes that the Crimeans’ “military organization to a large extent followed social, clan and tribal lines. This alone prevented the emergence of closed and hereditary specialized military strata.”

And Jürgen Paul considers that the regular standing professional armies were rare and short-lived in the nomadic societies. Russian scholar Leonid Bobrov believes that Crimean warfare, although enriched with the gunpowder practices “was a regional variation of the late-Turkic military tradition of the nomads of the steppes,” and “its adaptation to the gunpowder revolution” of the sedentary armies rather than an integral part of the military revolution.

Bobrov discovers that other nomadic polities of the Western and Central Eurasian steppes, the Nogay Horde, in particular, were also involved in the formation of the gunpowder units and insistently searched for allies who could provide ready firearm troops for their armies. The Dnieper and Don Cossacks became this kind of supplier for the Crimeans and Nogays respectively, despite being unreliable.

Bobrov tells a story of how the Nogay Horde was destroyed by the Kalmyks, an Oirat Mongolian nomadic federation that overran the Western Eurasian steppes in the 17th century.

The Nogays were not able to counter the Kalmyks’ tactic of the lance attack at home since they did not have the necessary anchor of the wagon-camp with handgunners and artillery in their array. The Crimeans were saved due to their ability to deploy this anchor and repel the Kalmyks’ charges.

The gunpowder revolution looks much more important for steppe warfare than is normally considered. The Crimean army might be the particular nomadic case that corrects the sceptics’ estimations. Halil Inalcik and Leslie J.D. Collins unfold how the successors of Sahib Geray, great warrior Khans Devlet Geray and Gazi Geray, used the standing army of their predecessor, and Sheykhumerov observes it in the 17th and 18th centuries.

The Crimean military and political development on the eve and in the aftermath of the battle over the Rostislavl fords is an example of the uneven and combined development in the Early Modern Period. It is a bright illustration to the theory of Leon Trotsky, introduced by Justin Rosenberg, although its adepts remain caged within the sedentary-nomadic interaction and miss the inner dynamics of some nomadic societies.

The Crimean Khanate was an outstanding but not unique nomadic polity where the mighty socio-political transformation was pushed by the competitive military changes of the 16th and 18th centuries. It combined a sharp mutation of the native socio-political structures and adoptions from outside, similar to the Crimean pattern. The tribal structure of the Transcaucasian Turkmens, Qizilbash, the military and political base of the Safavids, transformed in the first half of the 16th century to the charismatic military groups, uymak, that became the operational divisions of the Safavid army.

The importance of the uymaks is often underscored to increase the historiographic value of the court slave troops of the Safavids, gulam, in mastering firearms, however, the uymaks’ importance in the Safavid campaigning against the Ottomans was prominent.

The Far Eastern tribal federation at the opposite end of the Eurasian steppe, later known as Manchu, advanced to military prominence after 1601 when its leader, Nurhaci, introduced the banner system. He reorganized the tribal militia into the military divisions, gūsa, consisting of permanent companies, niru. Peter Lorge considers the banner system to be the first reason for the Manchu’s fighting capability.

Other authors often omit it preferring to demonstrate the gunpowder innovations, administrative institutions and renegades that the Manchu borrowed from the Chinese. Geoffrey Parker, one of the founders of the military revolution concept, tracks the interaction of this organic Manchu military change with the Chinese adoptions.

Lorge and Parker see their combination as the leverage for the Manchu’s great enterprise, Da Ye, the conquest of China. The Crimean, Qizilbash and Manchu nomadic patterns of the military and social dynamics in the 16th to 17th centuries, combining organic changes and borrowings, were vigorous similar to the European military revolution although these two paths were increasingly diverging. “A climax and a conclusion” of “interaction between settled and nomadic peoples” that Morillo, Black, and Lococo find were far from evident.

Political reforms became elements of military change

The pace of the military innovations in the West and East differed not in the stages of the civilizational development over centuries but in years and sometimes months. The Muscovite militaries faced it on 23 August to 4 October 1552 at Kazan.

The campaign was one of the major events of the 16th century and its military, national and geopolitical aspects have been studied in detail. In the most of descriptions, it looks like the showpiece of the gunpowder revolution and military organizational reform. It was carried out by a huge army with plenty of professional standing troops.

The Muscovite army was diversified and consisted of cavalry, infantry, artillery, riverine flotilla with onboard guns and amphibious troops, engineering corps and scouts; it fought with good tactical coordination according to the smart operational design, timing and knowledge of the terrain. The Muscovite campaign at Kazan in 1552 looks like the watershed moment between Medieval and Early Modern warfighting in Eastern Europe, between the rising West and stagnating East. Was it?

Marshal Poe defines how in the middle of the 16th century “the Muscovite elite began to alter the composition of its forces, in part to make the older cavalry army more effective and in part to take advantage of Western gunpowder technology.” Major Soviet medievalist Aleksander Zimin devoted a special study to the Muscovite military reforms that were carried out on the eve of the taking of Kazan in 1552. Zimin, the prolific author of multiple books and essays on the Russian history of the 14th to 17th centuries considers that the unsteady organization of the army was the main shortcoming of Muscovite warfare on the eve of the campaign. The government of Tsar Ivan IV the Terrible introduced a clear order of the top-rank appointments and leadership in the troops. The government’s project to accommodate the chosen “thousand” nobles around Moscow delivered the pool of reliable officials for medium-rank appointments in the army and administration Vitaly Penskoy in his study of the middle-level military leaders of the Muscovite army in the middle of the 16th century describes the rise of the lower gentry to command positions due to their fighting experience with decreasing influence of their social background. A new command structure of the Muscovite forces was implemented.

The ad hoc tactical corpses were changed to administrative divisions that consisted of “hundreds,” sotnya. The division became similar to the West European administrative regiment or Spanish tercio, and a hundred was similar to the company. The sotnyas had a constant composition and predictable fighting capability. Depending on the combat situation, the division could have taken a different array in the same way as the Spanish tercio and West European regiment had the different options of deployment in action, esquadron and batallion. It was a change from the late medieval array determined by social and territorial adhesion to the military array determined by organizational and tactical objectives.

Richard Helie and Vitaly Penskoy study the regulation of the basic mobilization unit of the territorial company, a military serviceman with his retainers, that was introduced in 1550 to 1552, on the eve of the Kazan campaign, and legally imposed in 1555 to 1556, in its aftermath. Scholars look at it as the most important component of the Muscovite military reforms in the middle of the 16th century. The number of servicemen’s retainers and their equipment was linked to the productive capacity of their land allotment and the volume of their stipend from the treasury.

Soviet historians Victor Paneyakh and Evgenia Kolycheva explore the legal norms that provided the fighting retainers for the gentry. The retainers, kholops, were not fighting slaves or serfs but professionals who provided military labor for cash or similar remuneration. Oleg Kurbatov finds that due to the reform the Muscovite cavalry became more numerous and capable of more effective tactics, although the muster prescription of the cavalryman’s arms and armor restricted to the cavalry some important technique variations like the cohesive spear-charge. The conclusions Penskoy reaches are unusual. The reforms of the Muscovite cavalry in the middle of the 16th century fixed its numerical domination in the Muscovite army and persisted with its archaic Tatar-like tactics.

All that made Penskoy doubt the military revolution in Russia in the period of the Kazan campaign of 1552 similar to Aleksander Bołdyrew’s doubts about the Polish army. The handgun infantry and artillery components of Tsar Ivan IV’s military reforms look for Penskoy like a disguise of Western modernity on the tsar’s “oriental” host. Dianne L. Smith then concluded that “Muscovy essentially possessed two separate armies: one predominantly cavalry with infantry and artillery support to fight the Tatars in the south, and a second force predominantly infantry and artillery with cavalry support to fight in the west and north.”

Aleksander Zimin describes the introduction of the standing infantry with firearms only after he deals with the organizational military reforms. It seems that this order was determined not by their research value but their importance for the army’s capability. Zimin demonstrates that new infantry corps of streltsy, handgun-shooters, succeeded the former conscripted handgunners of which 3,000 were enlisted to serve on a standing basis.

Penskoy adds the adoption of the Western experience that was learned in fighting against Central-European soldiers and was brought to Moscow by mainly Italian and German mercenaries and advisers. Sergey Nefedov points out the probable Muscovite adoption of the Ottoman military practice. However, American scholar Carol Stevens argues for the completely different organic emergence of the streltsy. It was the border defenses of the Oka’s Bereg where the new kinds of troop mobilization and combat practice emerged. Stevens points out the special governmental chancellery and taxation that had been introduced to manage and maintain the hirelings of the Bereg defense in the 1530s and then took over the running of the streltsy corps. It was a practice that gave birth to the streltsy corps, and neither based on Western or Ottoman adoption nor the tsar’s antique knowledge and mystic revelation as some other authors suppose.

Stewens’ conclusion is very important, because Poe’s implementation of the military reforms imagined by some court elite is one thing and the governmental efforts to tame the military changes that were generated by the widening military practice is completely another. Among the latter the build-up of the handgunner corps was one of the government’s prime deals.

The centralized recruitment of commoners to the military service in the gunpowder units and governmental regulation of the military labor is considered a feature of the military revolution in Western Europe. Muscovy did not lag far behind. The standard weaponry, regular training and refined organization in the permanent units, prikaz, were the main advantages of the streltsy over former conscripted handgunners. The distinguished service of streltsy at Kazan in 1552 caused the fast growth of their numbers from 3,000 in 1550 to around 20,000 at the end of the 16th century and their spread from Moscow to almost all towns of Muscovy.

Despite Penskoy’s suspicions of the streltsy’s copying of Western infantry warfare, Michael Paul finds the streltsy’s employment to be different. The streltsy rarely fought alone in the open, but were always deployed under the protection of cavalry and “fired upon the enemy from wooden platforms, from behind moats or fascines, or from within mobile wooden fortifications.”

Paul’s observation rather confirms Nefedov’s belief that the Ottoman janissaries were behind the streltsy’s combat style because the Ottoman wagon-camp, tabur, had the same function. Robert Frost sees the wagon-camp array as the ad hoc solution forced on the infantry by the cavalry’s agility and shock, and the shortcomings of the firearms.

Meanwhile Brian Davies and Vitaly Penskoy show that the deployment of the Muscovite handgunners behind the moving walls, gulyay-gorod, or in fighting wagons oboz, was an elaborate tactical innovation similar to the Western pike hedge. In Western Europe where cavalry used short-range pistols, the pikemen were the effective barrier, but in Eastern Europe, where the cavalry decimated infantry by use of mightier composite bows, the wagon-camp and friendly cavalry were the better protection.

Richard Hellie insists that streltsy did not participate intentionally in hand-to-hand combat. However, from the first appearance of pishchalniki as the shock force in the storming of Smolensk in 1513 to the streltsy’s premier spearheading the assault on Kazan in 1552, the cold steel fight was their intrinsic function inseparable from handgun shooting.

Fig 9. The climax of the Muscovite firepower Smolensk, the main Polish-Lithuanian stronghold in Western Rus was bombarded to surrender in 1514. The Russian mili- tary relied on their artillery superiority ever since.

The Russian Illustrated Anthological Chronicle of the Sixteenth Century. The Shumilor Volume, Moscow. The Russian Na- tional Library, JI. 731. Courtesy of Runivers, Russia

The eyewitness description of the taking of Kazan in 1552 confirms that the long spear was used by the Muscovite infantry, its fighting function was similar to the function of the Western pike, and the Muscovite support of the spear charge with the handgun shooters was probably a situational use of the pike-and-shot tactic. Michael Paul rightfully mentions that together with the streltsy the attack was manned by Muscovite “universal soldiers”, the retainers of the service nobles, and also, Penskoy adds, by the domestic hirelings, Cossacks, who fought like Western dragoons.

The establishment of the streltsy corps was only a part of the broader Muscovite reform that also injected the practice of infantry warfare and firearms inside the predominant cavalry bulk of the army.

Muscovite artillery development was another venture that corrected the army’s cavalry bulk. Richard Hellie states that by 1600, Muscovy had 3,500 cannons, and by the late 1600s, from 4,000 to 5,000 pieces. “Russian military successes […] can be attributed in large part to the skilful use of artillery.” Aleksey Lobin agrees that the Muscovite artillery was rearmed with the most advanced types of bronze cannon, which were produced in big numbers in high quality according to the best technology imported from the West.

Mario Corti relates the transfer of the manufacturing technology and battlefield experience from Italian states to Muscovy. The Muscovite siege and fortress artillery was substantially improved and regimental artillery to support the cavalry and infantry in action was established. The development and deployment of the artillery was a special accomplishment of the tsar’s military administration. Vitaly Penskoy considers that Muscovy’s military bureaucracy and logistics, the prerequisites of the Muscovite military successes, were put in order and vested with broader authority and responsibility to prepare for the venture against Kazan in 1552. American scholar Dianne L. Smith describes a range of the specialized bureaucratic bodies that were set up under the Military Chancery, Razryadny Prikaz, to manage the military affairs including personnel, weaponry and fortifications, military logistics and operational deployment. “Muscovy was faced with conducting operations over distances matched only by its Ottoman neighbors.” Smith is especially attentive to the Muscovite administration of the military transportation and supply with its career managing staff and conscripted personnel, resembling in her brief depiction Jan Glete’s well-researched Swedish naval administration, a co-runner of the fiscal-military absolutism.

Sergey Bogatyrev tracks the transformation of the monarch’s authority in Muscovy just before and immediately after the taking of Kazan. The introduction of the title of tsar for the monarch with its imperial ambitions and religious fever turned the tsar dynasty into the embodiment of sacred power.

The claim was illustrated by the scenes of the taking of Kazan in the chronicles and on the icons. It became the leverage for autocratic rule. Autocratic rule is the base of Marshall Poe’s well-known concept of the military revolution in Muscovy, cited above. Poe does not define either the events that saw it emerge or the political forces involved in its emergence. It seems that Poe’s Muscovite autocracy, which ram-battered Russia’s path to an imperial future, had been the product of the dynastic, military, and ideological circumstances of the exact military event, the taking of Kazan in 1552. The Muscovite autocracy looks like one of the military changes. And the Russian military revolution was not turned out to be by divine imperative but the product of political and personal struggle and bargaining.

Brian Davies reasonably argues that Marshall Poe as well as Richard Hellie and Richard Pipes underrun the political practice and overestimate the “totalizing claims” of the Muscovite rulers, “autocracy, patrimonialism, and universal compulsory state service.” Although Davies pays regard to the adepts of this theory, he demonstrates in his books and essays a substantially different picture of the dissident and mutinous interaction of the broader Muscovite society with the rulers and their rules, of the administrative and military forms created by the combat practice and social pressure from below that the rulers integrated into their representation of power while vesting it with an autocratic mantle.

The Muscovite military reforms, the bureaucratic transformation of government and the upgrade of the monarchy to tsar status were accomplished not by the monarch’s will alone but together with the estate representatives, the Sobor. The Sobor established itself as the pillar of power in January of 1542, only six months after the battle of the Rostislavl fords, when Prince Ivan Shuysky, the Muscovite commander-in-chief, suddenly directed at Moscow the army of the territorial companies, that was collected under his command on the border with Kazan.

Mikhail Krom and Aleksander Korzinin describe how Shuysky’s troops entered the capital, overturned the government, dethroned the Orthodox Metropolitan and made the teenage Grand Prince Ivan IV (future) the Terrible stay at attention before the icons in his bedroom while the troopers searched his palace for the hated grandees to bruise, arrest and exile them. In a few weeks, the same provincial cavalry troopers, together with some townsfolk’s elders and church bishops, self-composed the estate legislative, Sobor. Princes Ivan Shuysky and Dmitry Belsky, the army’s chief field commander at Kolomna in 1521 and Rostislavl in 1541, presided over the Sobor.

All of the Sobor’s reforms were in favor of the territorial cavalry’s servicemen. The Sobor introduced the new legislation on the service land allotments, army command appointments, taxation and local administration.

It was the final moment of the transformation of the Muscovite army of the territorial companies into the social class when the army became the corporation of the military servicemen-landowners.

Acting as the Sobor, the army-estate arrogated a substantial part of the Muscovite sovereignty that had belonged to the Rurikid grand prince dynasty indivisibly. After the turnover of January of 1542, the tsar’s power was unable to impose important legislation on the army, taxes, administration and foreign affairs without the Sobor. The autocratic claims of the Muscovite tsars, soaring to the heavens, were accompanied by the steady and well-grounded increase of the estates’ political position.

The class of the cavalry servicemen gained the majority in the Sobor in 1549. The local administration was grabbed by their corporative institutions invariably. The Muscovite military reforms in the middle of the 16th century could be taken as the tsar’s order or divine will, following the propaganda literature or icons, and they could be studied as the Muscovite example of the corporatization of sovereignty that became the important component of the socio-military transformation in the first stage of the military revolution cycle.

On 2 July 1554 and in March to April 1556, two Muscovite amphibious assaults followed one after another on the Astrakhan Khanate, a Tatar successor of the Golden Horde, although much weaker than the Crimean and Kazan Khanates. While the Muscovite conquest of the Kazan Khanate was a major military event with tens of thousands of combatants, the conquest of the Astrakhan Khanate was the achievement of the small amphibious force composed of professional troops and a riverine flotilla equipped with onboard artillery. Considering the high position of the Astrakhan Khanate in the Steppe Tatar hierarchy, the achievement was stunning. It supplanted the Muscovite strategy against the Tatar successor polities of the Golden Horde with the riverine amphibious component. From 1556 to 1560 the Muscovite amphibious troops carried out a series of riverine and offshore attacks against the Crimean and Ottoman facilities on the Northern Black Sea and Azov Sea shores.

The Muscovite amphibious attacks carried out over the thousand kilometers of the uninhabited wild steppe from the border forts at the rivers Don and Dnieper upper reaches toward their mouths in the Black Sea and Azov Sea became the military operations that first time integrated the vast fragmented frontier, the Ukraine, as the all-in-one region. The Ukraine emerged as the military-geographical wholeness to be filled with the ethnic and political contents.

Russian historian Oleg Kuznetsov, Ukrainian researcher Volodymyr Serhiychuk and French scholar Chantal Lemercier-Quelquejay demonstrate the process of diffusion of the Muscovite firearms and amphibious tactics to the Dnieper Cossacks during their mercenary service in the Muscovite riverine expeditions to the Crimean and Ottoman Black Sea facilities.

Marina Tolmacheva relates how the Dnieper Cossacks’ disturbed the Ottoman Empire with this signature tactic in the 17th century, the last century of the Ottomans’ expansion before their decline. The common social background of the Muscovite personnel, consisting mainly of the streltsy handgunners and domestic Cossacks, and the Dnieper Cossacks of the lower Lithuanian martial estate and marginals, smoothed the transfer of military knowledge between those warrior groups. It seems that in Eastern Europe the riverine and offshore amphibious warfare of the gunpowder epoch became the military technique of the marginal social elements of the former Medieval society that, together with other forces, shattered the existing political order as in the states where the objectives of their raiding were located, the Ottoman Empire and Crimean Khanate as in the states to which they declared their allegiance, Muscovy and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. This riotous nature of the frontier warrior social groups, united by the amphibious and light firearms tactic, burst into the Muscovite and Polish-Lithuanian civil wars of the 17th century.

The Muscovite riverine amphibious superiority became strategically decisive in 1569 when the major Ottoman amphibious assault on the new Muscovite fortress in Astrakhan was repulsed which virtually cut short Ottoman ambitions in the Caspian and Central Asia region forever.

A Russian scholar Vadim Trepavlov underlines the key importance of the Muscovite conquest of Astrakhan for the fragmentation and further demise of the Nogay Horde, the most populous nomadic successor of the Golden Horde. The demise of the Nogay Horde removed the barrier from Muscovite expansion into the Caspian region and Central Asia which became the second prospect of the Muscovite imperial aggrandisement after the march into Siberia towards the Pacific. Siberia was opened for Muscovite expansion by the amphibious venture of 1582 against the Siberian Khanate carried out according to the Astrakhan experience by the troops staffed with the Astrakhan-seasoned personnel.

American historian Robert J. Kerner argues in detail that the Muscovite southward and eastward expansion was predominantly based on the riverine amphibious gunpowder technique and control of the key communication points. Strangely, Geoffrey Parker, collecting his range of the military revolution’s souvenirs from different parts of the globe ignores Kerner’s concept despite his (Parker’s) close attention to the military changes in Russia. Possibly the reason is that Kerner had authored his book on the high tide of American sympathy to Russia in the middle of WWII and Parker reforged Roberts’ military revolution concept in the stale air of animosity in the Cold War’s closing years.

Significantly, the advance of the Muscovite amphibious tactic coincided in time with the construction of the Abatis defensive line 100 kilometres south of the Oka’s Bereg. The Muscovite gunpowder and infantry innovations were necessary for the functioning of the Abatis line because it was not a fortification to hold on to but was a complex of barriers and traps to channel the Tatar forces of invasions to some bottleneck narrows where they were decimated by the Muscovite firepower of the artillery and infantry with handguns.

The Abatis operational deployment of the Muscovite army that was introduced along the new defensive line became centrally regulated and rigid in the same way as the Bereg Array, and had much less tactical diversity than the Polish-Lithuanian Lvov Rule. The initiative of the Muscovite commanders was contained on the local level, the operational decision-making was made in the Military Chancery, and the variations of the tactic were prescribed. Brian Davies carefully concludes that “assuming over-centralization was a chronic problem rendering Muscovite army operations generally less effective [than Polish-Lithuanian] probably goes too far.” Both armies had their achievements and failures. The Muscovite amphibious tactic and defensive lines worked together as the strategical arrangement that surpassed the advantages that the Crimean and Ottoman warfare still enjoyed in the steppes.

Davies sees that the construction of the Abatis line and Abatis operational deployment had revolutionary social and political consequences. The newly colonized lands became a substantial part of the territory where the Russian nation consolidated and the new groups of the population, of key importance for Russian history, emerged. The Muscovite fiscal and military bureaucracy that transformed the Muscovite state and army into a fiscal-military state by the reign of Emperor Peter the Great had emerged through the construction of the frontier defensive lines and administration of the standing regular army which settled on them.

Michael Paul sees that “Russia adopted some Western siege techniques as early as the famous assault on Kazan’ in 1552” but they were mixed with use of the traditional Russian Medieval siegecraft. Christopher Duffy, an expert on the Early Modern siege, writes that “the impression of modernity was some-what spoilt at Kazan by the forty-foot siege tower.” While stocked with ten large and 50 smaller guns, “the tower still harked back to the siege machines of the Middle Ages.

Was the Muscovite military revolution such a cumbersome mixture of the advanced Western and stale aborigine features? Vitaly Penskoy advocates the military revolution in Russia in two stages with its gunpowder period in the 16th century and the complete reconstruction of the military and administration at the turn of the 17th to 18th centuries. Both of the stages were borrowing and chasing after the West-European (Penskoy) or Ottoman (Nefedov) military racers. Robert Frost and Aleksander Bołdyrew advocate the same borrowing-chasing approach for the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth with the difference that the second stage was never carried out in the Commonwealth at all. Marshall Poe finds for his “hybrid military-fiscal format-cavalry / streltsy” the track of providential activity of the Muscovite court elite. The organic self-sustained Muscovite development of Robert J. Kerner and Carol B. Stevens that we have met above is the third direction. Quo vadis?

Discussing long-running socio-political matters, Alexander Zimin turns the order of the practical layout of the Muscovite military reforms completely around. Zimin nominates the establishment of streltsy standing handgunners as evidence of the Marxian transformation of Muscovy from feudalism to capitalism with the growth of the military importance of the town-based gunpowder warfare over the rural-based noble cavalry and the rise of the bureaucratic absolutism over the feudal corporations. The co-run of the Muscovite taking of Kazan in 1552, which was abundant with military changes, and the socio-political transformation in the same years was not coincidental.

It was the tight knot that brought to Muscovy the superiority over its geopolitical contenders further east and south-east of Eurasia and reversed its ambitions to the west and north-west. It was exactly this turn which initiated the socially and politically destructive components of the extremely effective military development. The name of this turn is the Livonian War.

The mobilizational political regime drove civil war

From January 1558 to September 1560 the Muscovite armies of different numbers and compositions consisting of the territorial cavalry companies, Tatar mercenaries, standing handgunner corps and artillery waged winter and summer campaigns with the general objective of overrunning the territory of the Livonian Confederation, the protectorate of the Livonian Order, in the Eastern Baltic.

They were opposed by Livonian troops consisting of German mercenaries, the Order’s units of knight-brothers and landowning knights, and urban and peasant militia. The Muscovites managed to grab the eastern slice of Livonia with some important towns, however its central and western parts with two principal centers, Riga and Revel (now Tallinn) remained out of their reach. Vitaly Penskoy considers that the failure of the Muscovite siege of Weesenstein in August to September 1560 and the entrance of Lithuania, Poland, Sweden and Denmark into the struggle over the Livonian legacy meant the end of the Livonian War, and its expansion into (using the notion of Robert Frost) the First Northern War.

Both Penskoy, more attentive to the Muscovite side, and Frost, more attentive to the Livonian side, underline that the Livonian stalemate of 1560 was not caused by the sides’ ignorance of the gunpowder revolution or weakness in the use of firearms. Penskoy describes the Muscovites’ use of the artillery as routine and flexible, as they were apt with the siege artillery to crush the fortress’ walls and bombard inside them with incendiary charges, using the field artillery for the formal battles and light artillery to support the raiding parties and melee groups. The Muscovite standing handgunner corps was the decisive assault tool in the sieges and field battles, while the mounted handgunners also accompanied the cavalry raiding parties.

However, from the strategic point of view, the performance of the advanced gunpowder troops was disappointing for the Muscovites. They neither accomplished the conquest nor prevented the competitors from entering the scene. Frost explains the Muscovite confusion by the density of the Livonian distributed defense of 110 Livonian castles well-equipped with firearms and prepared to resist the artillery. The Livonians imported from Germany the advanced weaponry, troops and commanders, and successfully fielded them.

However, the most advanced firearms and professional troops were a disappointment for the Livonians as well because they neither rebuffed the Muscovite invasion nor strengthened the power of the Livonian Order sufficiently to preserve its sovereignty. The strategic limitations of the advanced military were the first reason for the oncoming transfer of the military changes into the socio-political crisis.

Vitaly Penskoy identifies the Muscovite Livonian War as the probable point of over-centralization of the Muscovite military administration ahead of the centralization of the political affairs which the military centralization prompted. In striving to capitalize on the military changes the Muscovite government pressed the political regime and society too far into being subservient to them. Different discourses of three Russian historians, Boris Florya, Igor Froyanov, and V.A. Kolobkov demonstrate that the harsh rhetoric of the Muscovite autocracy, which is sometimes considered the eminent reality of the Russian political constitution, was born in the political struggle following the dissatisfaction in Livonia.

They also accentuate the inner contradiction of the allegedly autocratic political model which in reality combined the tyranny of Tsar Ivan IV the Terrible that was imposed by terror, Oprichnina, and the growing power of the estates in administration, law-making, and the economy. In the aftermath of the Livonian military stalemate, Muscovy looked like the country of a huge oncoming political and social crisis to which nobody had a remedy.

The Muscovite warfare performance in the aftermath of the Livonian war looks like the demonstration of the specific causation of the military revolution epoch, when the military disasters followed the rift between the political regime, racing ahead with centralization, mobilization and military innovations, and an inert society, both alien to them and repelling them. In this situation, the government plays the role of a fire crew that faces a large town in flames with nothing but a solitary high-tech pump. It was exactly the position of the Muscovite rulers when on 28 July to 3 August 1572, the Muscovite army destroyed the superior Crimean invasion forces in the battle of Molodi, 70 km south of Moscow.

The battle of Molodi was a huge engagement with major strategic and military consequences. It was the battle where the Muscovite combat tactic against the Crimean army was refined. The wagon-camp remained the routine of the new tactic but its function was significantly changed. Brian Davies claims that the Muscovite mobile field fortification, gulyay-gorod, was not especially large in the battle of Molodi. It contained a limited force of 13,000 cavalry and 3,000 infantry with 100 guns defending the hilltop at the river Rozhay.

Vitaly Penskoy considers that all Muscovite position, not only the position of two divisions that Davies accounts for, was protected by the gulyay-gorod and oboz, the carts of the baggage train strengthened with earth-timber fieldworks. If Penskoy describes the Muscovite array more precisely, the reason for the Crimean failure to storm the gulyay-gorod is clear. The Crimeans were not able to encircle the Muscovite center because they were not able to break the gulyay-gorod’s flanks protected by the carts and fieldworks. The prolonged front allowed the Muscovite infantry to advance much of its firepower to the firing position. It also allowed the Muscovite cavalry to deploy together with the infantry and artillery which strengthened its stance in the bow-shooting contest and melee with the Crimeans.

The prolonged front of the Muscovite wagon-camp at Molodi became a significant tactical modification. The function of the wagon-camp as a mobile fort was dropped. Its function as the barrier between the infantry with handguns and enemy cavalry became more prominent, while the enemy assault was repelled mainly by fire. It was a victorious tactic that virtually closed the Muscovite heartland to the Crimean invasions after the next victory was achieved by its application at Kolomenskoye near Moscow in the middle of July 1591. It also served the Muscovite army well in its fights against the Poles who relied on their lancer cavalry, the hussaria.

The Muscovite tactic of “wagenburg convoy” that Davies analyses in detail was the development of the Molodi deployment. It dominated the Muscovite land operations from the end of the 16th to the beginning of the 18th centuries when the adoption of the socket bayonet and flintlock handguns allowed the wagon-camp to be dropped and use the infantry columns to fight against the cavalry of the Crimeans, Poles, Ottomans, etc.

The battle of Molodi with its principal significance of the infantry firepower marked the fast progress of the Muscovite fighting capability not only against the Crimeans but also against the Poles-Lithuanians and Swedes in Livonia. When in 1572 the fresh Muscovite army entered Livonia, it found the distributed castle defense that stopped it in 1560 much strengthened.

A dozen of the large fortresses and tens of the medium forts were interspersed with hundreds of towers, stone and earth-timber blockhouses. During the previous decade they were improved with elements of the bastion design, settled with the mercenary garrisons and trained, and motivated local militia. This fortified network denied not only the acquisition of the territory but also any raiding opportunities because the population learned to evacuate to the shelters and hide their valuables there. The former Muscovite tactic of the prolonged siege and bombardment of the castles was ineffective because there were too many of them. The new tactic of a storm into the breach opened by the concentrated artillery fire became the remedy for the Muscovite expansion.

The strong castle of Weesenstein, which held out twice against the weeks-long Muscovite sieges in 1558 and 1560, was taken by storm in 1572. During the next five years, the Muscovites managed to establish their control over central Livonia.

Russian historians Nikolay Likhachev and V.A. Kolobkov demonstrate that the Russian bureaucracy that was allegedly committed to military expansion and imperial grandeur was not of the eminent nature of the Muscovite state from its inception in the 15th century, as the adepts of the autocratic theory believe. It grabbed its superior position over the estate and corporative institutions in the short intermediate period between the catastrophe of the Muscovite army’s defeat at Moscow in 1571, which was followed by the capital’s burning and destruction, and the major victory of Molodi that turned the table on the Muscovite conflict with the Crimean Khanate. It was the year when Chancellor Adrey Shchelkavov, the commoner appointee of the tsar, restructured the Muscovite bureaucracy.

The tsar’s political control over the traditional estate government was substituted by the new bureaucratic construction. The Muscovite governmental organization that dominated the political landscape until the Petrine reforms at the beginning of the 18th century was born, and many of its elements remained active far into the 19th century. It was shaped by the deadly emergency of desperate military and international situations in 1571 to 1572 but its steadiness impressed the foreign eyewitnesses and current historians to believe that it was intrinsic to Muscovy. Penskoy regrets that the Muscovite civil war in the first decades of the 17th century, the Time of Troubles, interrupted the growth of the bureaucratic government which he sees as a “slow, gradual, stretched in time” evolution, not a “radical overturn.” At the same time, the military development that overran the social evolution was probably the prime cause of the Time of Troubles. The rift between administrative vigor and social values could have been a cause of the Muscovite civil war of the first decades of the 17th century.

A postponed effect of the Molodi disaster is contained in Carl Kortepeter’s narrative on the Crimean Khanate’s troubles in the last quarter of the 16th century. In October of 1584, the Ottoman commander-in-chief, serdar, in Transcaucasia Osdemiroglu Osman Pasha crossed the Caucasian passes, forded the river Terek, marched over the inflamed North-Caucasian steppe of Kuban, walked on foot over the unusually frozen Strait of Kerch and invaded the Crimea. At the same time, the Ottoman chief admiral, Uluç-Kiliç Ali Pasha landed at the city of Kaffa. They overthrew Khan Muhammad Geray II who was then killed by his rivals.

Ozdemiroglu Osman Pasha changed the Crimean political constitution substituting the sovereignty of the Crimean khans for Ottoman sovereignty. The overturning was manifested by the reading of the Ottoman sultan’s name first in the Friday prayer, khutba, a clear proclamation of the khanate’s lord. The khan ceased to be a sovereign not only for the Crimean subjects but for his Muscovite diplomatic counterparts too.

The change was followed by the civil war in the Crimean Khanate that continued during the critical last decade of the 16th century when the Muscovite and Polish-Lithuanian colonization advances into the wild steppe must have been restricted to ensure the khanate’s long-term survival. The wild steppe was the natural barrier that protected the Crimean Khanate, its erosion rendered the khanate deathly vulnerable.

The critical decade was wasted. In the 16th century, the Crimean Khanate was a dynamic military state with the potential of transformation to a nation-state, integrating the decaying nomadic “civilization” of the Northern Black Sea, Caucasus and Caspian region, their settlement to agriculture and colonization of this naturally abundant region. However, the Crimean society, of which the Tatar clans were the political agents, was terrified by the military and political changes launched by Khan Sahib Geray and continued by Khan Devlet Geray. When the debacle of Molodi in 1572 debilitated the khan’s authority and his standing forces, the Tatar clans turned to the Ottoman assistance in returning to the traditional power and military arrangement.

The Ottomans utilized the moment to arrogate Crimean sovereignty.

The Ottomans needed the Crimeans’ unrivalled ability to hunt for slaves, and they used them to deliver the slaves for their Northern Black Sea latifundia that had the same importance for the Early Modern Ottoman economy as the overseas colonies for the West-European maritime powers. Ottomans needed the Crimean light cavalry to support their gunpowder armies in Hungary, Ukraine and Transcaucasia, and they mobilized Crimeans to their, Ottomans’, wars. However, the Ottomans denied the social and political modernization to the Crimean Khanate as well as its military modernization, providing the necessary advanced solutions from outside, from the Ottoman’s forces and institutions. The Crimean Khanate fell prey to the rift between the military dynamics and social stagnancy in Eastern Europe at the turn of the 16th century.

Lithuania’s sovereignty was smashed by military changes in a similar way. Belarusian historian Andrey Yanushkevich demonstrates that during a decade of the First Northern War between 1560 and 1570, the composition of Lithuanian forces changed. The Lithuanian army was transformed from the gentry levy into a predominantly professional force. The impression of the gentry levy’s fighting capability was negative from the very beginning of the Lithuanian intervention in Livonia in 1560.

Fig. 10 and 11. The beginning of the mine war in Eastern Europe. The earth-wooden- fortifications of Starodub turned impregnable against the Polish-Lithuanian wall-crush- ing guns. However, they were blown up by the enemy’s underground charge and the fortress was stormed into the opened breach.

The Russian Illustrated Anthological Chronicle of the Sixteenth Century. The Tsardom Book, Moscow. The Russian State Historical Museum, JI. 113 and 113 06. Courtesy of Runivers, Russia

The gentry evaded the mobilization and avoided fighting. The levy was the cavalry that fought astride with cold steel, meanwhile the fighting in Livonia against the Swedes and Muscovites require the infantry with firearms. The siege, taking and keeping of the castles and blockhouses were the main troops’ commitment. The seasonal schedule of the levy’s service became another issue since the fighting in Livonia continued around the year.

When in 1562 it became clear that the conflict over Livonia would spread to all giant borderlands with Muscovy, the levy looked inadequate to the challenge. When in the winter of 1563, in the middle between the normal fighting seasons, the Muscovites attacked Polotsk, the Lithuanians were able to field the relief corps of only 2,000 men of the levy. The city was abandoned and surrendered. The attempt to enforce on the gentry more rigid rules of service via the Diet’s legislation failed and the mobilizations of the levy in 1564, 1565 and 1566 were a setback.

The desperate Sejm of 1567 declared a personal call-up of all gentry and introduced the mobilization of peasantry and townsfolk with spears and handguns to make up the infantry that the Lithuanian army needed to oppose the Muscovite arrogation of the borderland by advancing small earth-wooden castles to the key locations. The authorities managed to assemble 28,000 troops but after a couple of months stay in the camp at Molodechno the levy walked apart.

Although Yanushkevich states that the fast-growing Lithuanian professional army was “below expectations,” its performance was a striking contrast to the levy’s shortcomings. In fact, the Lithuanian professional army before the conflict over Livonia never existed as a standing force, but was always recruited for a campaign or two and then dismissed.

Only a few hundred of the professional troops served as the court bodyguard. Lithuania fielded the professional armies only half of a dozen times since its civil war in the first third of the 15th century, in the aborted campaign against Muscovy in 1480, in the allied campaign with Poland against Moldavia in 1497, and against Muscovy in 1500 to 1503, 1508, 1514, 1535. It never numbered more than 2,000 to 4,000 men.

The professional part of the Lithuanian army always consisted of the self-minded Polish corps, with the native Lithuanian professional units only appearing in the last conflict, the Starodub War. Since 1560, the professional cavalry and infantry were hired to garrison the castles in southern Livonia that asked for Lithuanian protection, on a standing basis. From 1565 to 1567 they numbered 3,000 men. The professional troops of the Livonian Order that switched to the Lithuanian service were very important to wrestle central Livonia from the Swedes who were the pioneers of infantry warfare in Northern Europe.

Nevertheless, the main successes of the new Lithuanian professional troops were achieved in the borderlands against the Muscovites. In 1664, the Lithuanian professional army of 6,000 to 10,000 men ambushed and defeated the Muscovite corps at Ula near Polotsk. In 1667, near Lake Susha the Lithuanian professional corps of 2,000 men destroyed by surprise the Muscovite troops in their night camp. In the same year, the Lithuanian professional corps of 3,000 men defeated the Russian troops near fort Kopiye.

And in 1568, 1,700-strong Lithuanian professional corps took by surprise the fort Ula that the levy of 18,000 men unsuccessfully sieged and stormed a few months before. The performance of the Lithuanian professional troops seemed significantly superior to the levy’s incapability. Marek Plewczyński advises that a large part of the Lithuanian infantry was recruited from the local Lithuanian Cossacks, the men of free social stock, and marginals. It is one of the intrinsic features of the new military labor of the military revolution epoch, that searched the loose pockets of the rigid late medieval social arrangements.

Besides the locals, the Lithuanian government hired 7,000 to 10,000 contracted mercenaries from Poland in 1565 to 1566. Just in a decade, Lithuanian warfare achieved the extraordinary transformation. All three principal military reforms of Renaissance were implemented, the change of the cavalry to infantry, cold steel to firearms, social forces of the levy and militia to professional men. And the Lithuanian administration learned to recruit and maintain this army for a few years in a row.

Andrey Yanushkevich shows the fast development of the Lithuanian finances during the Livonian War that allowed Lithuania to field a numerous, permanent and capable professional army. In its first stage, 1558 to 1563, the Lithuanian army was financed in the traditional way, from the income of the grand prince’s domain and two emergency public taxes introduced by the Sejm, the land tax, serebshchina, and poll tax, pogolovshchina.

The public taxes were badly paid and collected, and the main financial burden of war was born by the domain. The Muscovite grab of Polotsk in 1563 changed the stance of Poland. Robert Frost relates that the Polish Sejm voted in 1563 and 1565 for the emergency taxes most of which were channeled to support the Lithuanian professional army, and the volume of the Polish subsidies was three to five times bigger than the Lithuanian spending from their sources. Marek Plewczyński mentions that the Polish Sejm allowed the Brandenburg elector, kurfürst, the hereditary possession of the Duchy of Prussia in exchange for his large loan to Lithuania. Dariusz Kupisz states that in 1564 to 1565 the Polish Sejm subsidized the hiring of 10,000 to 12,000 men for the Lithuanian permanent army while the Lithuanian treasury was able to cover the cost of half as much. The Polish subsidies dominated the Lithuanian war finances during the Livonian War, in 1564 to 1567. In 1567 to 1569, new drastic measures were introduced to improve the payment and collection of the Lithuanian public taxes.

They followed the sharp administrative reform of 1565 and the introduction of the new Law Codification, Lithuanian Statut of 1566. A formidable increase in the volume of the treasury’s incomes and their stability was the result of the reform. After the reform, Lithuania became able to recruit and support a permanent professional army of 20,000 to 25,000 men. Lithuania managed to bear this strain five years in a row, despite the elimination of its sovereignty and annexation of its half by the Polish Crown according to the Unia of Lublin in 1569.

Despite the improved Lithuanian position in the Livonian War which the Lithuanian professionals achieved, the Lithuanian magnates gave up on the political manipulation of King Sigismund II Augustus and allowed him to accomplish the Unia of Lublin with Poland in 1569.

On the eve of the Unia, the Lithuanians were looking for a larger involvement of Poland in their war against Muscovy; in particular, they requested that the Poles finance the professional troops. However, the Unia of Lublin turned out to be another thing completely. It ended Lithuanian sovereignty and transferred to the Polish Crown the Lithuanian South-Western Rus, contemporary Ukraine.

From the eve of the Starodub Campaign in 1535 to the Lublin Unia of 1569, Lithuania significantly strengthened its structures of the military state establishing the standing professional army and fiscal system to support it. The Lithuanian military reforms were more diversified and had greater perspective than the Polish military arrangement which Lithuania copied after the Lublin Unia because Lithuania had in its agenda not only a professional native cavalry and foreign mercenary infantry but also the troops of the broad recruitment of the freemen and marginal, Ukrainian and domestic Cossacks.

It was a true mass army with a national interest that was based on advanced gunpowder warfare. And the Lithuanian fiscal system operated not only with the resources of the monarch’s domain but also with nationwide land and poll taxation. However, the conservative Lithuanian society of which the magnate factions were the political agents turned to the outside authority, the Polish magnate-szlachta corporation, looking to return to the traditional forms of power and military arrangements.

The turn was futile, and the burden of war remained, but with the cancellation of Lithuanian sovereignty, all the prospects of the Lithuanian fiscal-military dynamic were lost. Lithuania was dragged into modernity clanging to the Polish tail.

Was it a progressive, life-saving solution? Yes, it was for the short period of the First Northern War. Probably the Lithuanian ability to mobilize and support the permanent army was strengthened by the Lublin Unia of 1569 because the Lithuanian war efforts were transferred under the administration of the Polish Sejm where the Lithuanians composed just a fragmented minority and the Poles could have squeezed former Lithuania, especially its domain, hard. The strong Lithuanian participation in the Polotsk, Velikiye Luki and Pskov campaigns of King Stefan Batory in 1579 to 1582 was the fruit of this resource mobilization. The expectation of the prominent commanders of the Lithuanian professional army, like Mikołaj Radziwiłł the Red, Prince Roman Sanguszko and Filon Kmita, for the offensive war against Muscovy were accomplished, although in a way that the latter two could not appreciate.

Wasn’t the Lithuanian cost exorbitant, not in a sense of ethnic identity and other cultural matters, but in a sense of the fiscal-military, nation-state prospects of Lithuania?

The option of expansionist stability was explored

Was there a third way of escaping the rift between a vigorous mobilizational political regime and an overwhelmingly marauded society besides sliding into civil war, as in the case of Muscovy, or succumbing to outer sovereignty, as in the case of Lithuania and the Crimean Khanate? Yes, there was. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth moved on this path when its army sieged, stormed and forced the surrender of the Muscovite fortress of Polotsk on 10 to 31 August 1579. The siege was the most challenging kind of military engagement for the state’s capability to mobilize and supply the mass army in the Early Modern Period.

The Polish-Lithuanian performance at Polotsk in 1579 and following siege campaigns against Muscovy is the best material for verifying the routine historiographical estimation of the Polish-Lithuanian military and its interaction with the political regime and society.

For Jan Glete, the Spanish fiscal-military state “had been built on different socio-political foundations than those of the [absolutist] northern powers.” Was a fiscal-military state, similar to the Spanish one, rising in the same epoch in Poland? Polish historians Krzysztof Boroda and Piotr Guzowski demonstrate how the political movement for the revision of royal domain property and income, Egzekucja Praw, created the new financial constitution in Poland which was finalized at the Sejm of 1562.

The Sejm claimed the return of all domain property and royal prerogatives, rented, mortgaged and farmed out from 1504 when the ban on such deals was first issued. The Sejm also ordered the separation of a quarter of all royal revenue to finance the standing corps of the southern border defense, which was renamed Wojsko Kwarciane. In 1569 the treasury collected three times more revenues than in 1533. In the 1530s to the 1560s, the Sejm movement Egzekucja Praw effectively ran the work that in the West-European countries was an agenda of absolutist governments.

The difference did not erase the fiscal-military agenda of this work. Norman Davies shows that from the financial year 1576 to 1577 to the financial year 1585 to 1586 the royal revenues nearly doubled with the main increase in the customs, especially maritime, and the revenue of the Lithuanian domain. The Egzekucja Praw soared with the introduction of the free election of the king, Wolna Elekcja. The Convocation, Election, and Coronation Sejms of 1573 to 1574 established that it was not the person of a king or royal power in general but the szlachta class that was the possessor and master of the Polish-Lithuanian sovereignty.

A king became an elected person to whom a part of this sovereignty was entrusted as the royal authority over the matters defined by the Commonwealth.

This ideology of state power was an advantage when the szlachta and magnates consolidated over some objectives and it was a disadvantage when they quarrelled. The advantages worked well during the campaigns of Stephen Batory against Muscovy and a couple of decades later, but then the disagreements accrued on a disastrous scale. Two opposite political trends, of effective resource mobilization for war and debilitation of royal power, were born together in the circumstances of the conflict over Livonia.

During the preceding century, the Polish professional army normally numbered a couple of thousand commissioned cavalry and contracted infantry. Larger recruitments were rare. The Breslau expedition of King Kasimir III in 1474, the Moldavian expedition of King John-Albert in 1497, build-up against Muscovy in 1508 and the Teutons in 1519 – 1521, and three of Jan Tarnowski’s ventures, against Moldavia in 1531 and 1538, and Muscovy in 1535 were carried out with 3,000 to 5,000 paid men. At Polotsk in 1579, the Polish army consisted of around 11,000 hired professionals. The campaign of 1579 opened a period of half-decade when the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth fielded the professional armies of 40,000 to 80,000 men on a standing basis not only for the normal late spring to early autumn campaign season but throughout the year. In the last third of the 16th century, allegedly autocratic Muscovy and absolutist-charged Sweden, that opposed the Commonwealth, achieved nothing similar to the Polish-Lithuanian level of war mobilization and numbers of standing troops.

Observing the mobilization achievements of the Polish Crown for King Stefan Batory’s campaigns, Dariusz Kupisz claims that “the Polish-Lithuanian state achieved a force mobilization capability it had never had before” and “never again would the Commonwealth exert itself for the army on such a scale or for such duration.

Never again would so many foreign troops be hired.” It was the absolute achievement of Stephen Batory. But it wasn’t absolutist. Was it the example of the effective resource mobilization to war that was executed by the non-absolutist public authority? Might the amateur enthusiasts of the Sejm commissions have had the same potential for mobilization and allocation of resources to war as the hierarchical professional bureaucracy? It is the question of prosopographic research. Who were the executors of the Egzekucja Praw in person? Were they professional soldiers, clerks, or boring aristocrats fresh from Italian universities? Were they addicts of an abstract idea or some distinct social group?

The nature of the Commonwealth’s extraordinary mobilization was revealed on 24 January 1588 in the battle of Byczyna. The Polish standing army supporting the Swedish pretender to the Polish throne Prince Sigismund Vasa destroyed the enthusiastic forces of the Austrian pretender, Archduke Maximilian II Hapsburg.

The battle of Byczyna was not a big engagement, however it demonstrated that the political forces that relied on the professional army had much better prospects than the political forces that relied on popular support. The control of the standing army might have produced the type of dictatorship of which royal absolutism was only one of the forms. The constitution of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which was forged in the political struggle in the 1560s to 1570s, was not the constitution of the szlachta corporation interacting with the royal power.

A Pacta Conventa, the constitution established with the enthronement of the first Polish free-elected king, Henryk Walezy, also Henry III of France, introduced the governing royal council, Senat, of 16 members, that ran the executive power. The royal power was declared not to be self-sufficient but a king’s authority within the Senat. It was the centralized oligarchic dictatorship that was masked by the szlachta Republic and dominated the royal power due to the oligarchic control over the standing army. Chancellor Jan Zamoyski, the inventor of this construction, became the dictator de facto.

Zamoyski built up the Polish-Lithuanian standing army together with King Stephen Bathory, the successes of Zamoyski during the campaigns against Muscovy secured him the support of the military. At the Sejm of 1585 to 1586, the lower szlachta mutinied against Zamoyski’s dictatorship. The upheaval was suppressed by King Stephen Bathory’s retinue of 1,500 cavalry and Zamoyski’s retinue of 1,200 infantry of the standing army acting together. The extraordinary resource mobilization of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the last decades of the 16th century looks less as a triumph of the pseudo-republican institutions and more as coercion by the dictatorship of King Stephan Batory and Chancellor Jan Zamoyski that they established by employing their control over the Commonwealth’s standing army. It was a military dictatorship par excellence.

The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth turned to expansion, while Swedish gains in the Baltics were cut short and Muscovite ambitions suppressed. In 1590 and again in 1595, Zamoyski commanded the Polish professional army that prevented the far superior in numbers Ottoman-Crimean army from converting Moldavia into the Ottoman province and invading the Commonwealth.

Fig. 12. The launchpad of the Muscovite autocracy. The brutal suppression of the Novgorodian Republic with its specific political structure and social estates in the winter of 1488 became the pattern of the Muscovite rulers’ absolute power over their subjects

The Russian Illustrated Anthological Chronicle of the Sixteenth Century. The Shumilov Volume, Moscow The Russian National Library, JI. 314 06. Courtesy of Runivers, Russia

In the subsequent truce, the Crimean khan abandoned his supreme suzerainty over South-Western Rus that reduced the Lithuanian grand prince to the status of a usufruct of these territories in exchange for tribute. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth became the master of the steppe frontier, the Ukraine, and immediately started to allot the frontier lands to the Polish magnates. The Polish-led colonization of the Ukraine unfolded, and the migration of the agricultural population from Eastern Volhynia to Eastern Podolia and Kievan Land was its main content. It became the critical component of Ukrainian national consolidation.

Zamoyski effectively utilized the Commonwealth’s standing army in favor of the expansionist Polish frontier magnates, the faction to which he belonged. At the same time Zamoyski introduced a royal register of the salaried privileged service for the Dnieper Cossacks and proposed the objectives for their fighting zeal from Moldavia to the Baltics. The merger of Muscovy became the next point in his agenda and he looked to the standing army, magnate troops and Cossack bands as its main tools.

In 1584, Ivan Shuysky, King Stephen Bathory’s and Jan Zamoyski’s opponent in the Pskov campaign of 1581 to 1582, and Nikita Yurjev, seasoned commander of the Livonian front, determined the succession of the Muscovite throne and composed the government after the death of Tsar Ivan IV by the pressure of the standing troops under their hand.

It was an expansionist government that launched the offensive into the sparely populated steppe frontier. A bunch of new fortresses were founded there, including Voronezh, Livny, Saratov, Ufa, Samara, Tsaritsyn. They were garrisoned and settled not with the traditional Muscovite duet of enserfed peasantry and cavalry servicemen but with the freemen and marginals, domestic Cossacks, adept with firearms. In the north-east, the Muscovite fur entrepreneurs, colonizing Cossacks and fiscal bureaucracy rushed into Siberia.

The fighting superiority over the Crimeans and Ottomans that was seen in the amphibious struggle over Astrakhan in 1569 and battle of Molodi in 1572 was vigorously used for the impressive expansion of the Muscovite regnum.

Poland and Muscovy were not alone in the construction of the military oligarchic model of the government by the close of the first circle of the military revolution cycle. Despite its notorious absolutism, Sweden was another example of a realm where the absolutist and oligarchic trends collided and cooperated. The Ottoman empire was also converted to an oligarchy of power clans despite its despotic sultanism.

Both Axel Oxenstierna and Köprülü Mehmed Pasha, Swedish and Ottoman rulers, respectively, in the first and second thirds of the 17th century were exemplary dictators whose power was based on control over the standing army, extraction and allocation of resources to war. It could be proposed that the oligarchic model tending to military dictatorship became a more widespread form of the early fiscal-military state than royal absolutism in its inceptive form over all of Europe from the West to East. It was the regime of the oligarchic model that was crushed by the wave of civil wars that had been rolling through Europe since the last third of the 16th century when the first cycle of the military revolution came to a close.

CONCLUSION

Agents of military guidance over society

The 20 engagements in Eastern Europe that are presented in Table 1 to illustrate the current essay demonstrate how combat produced sound military innovations that were able to create new social groups and political institutions and destroy and disfigure the existing ones. Meanwhile, the capability of combat to act as the socio-political driver did not exist throughout all epochs. It is the specific achievement of the period of the military revolution. The impact of combat on social structure and political constitutions is very important for military history because only the military changes which transformed society and its regimes to suit their needs could become truly effective in combat.

One of the main issues of the military revolution debates consists in the difficulty of determining exactly what the agents are of the influence of the military affairs on society and political regimes. The study of the socio-military transformation in Eastern Europe reveals that from the establishment of the professional armies in the middle of the 15th century their commanders gradually ascended to positions of influence and power over the social leaders who had earlier dominated the political landscape. In the Middle Ages, all social leaders were also military commanders but they commanded social forces that were no more than armed societies, an amalgam of the levy and militia, mercenary bands and private households. These leaders could not have established the aims of military ambitions over society, as they acted as social actors on the military scene.

The commanders of the professional armies were of different stock. They promoted the interests of the armed forces that had different priorities than society, including the priorities of resource mobilization for war and military expansion. Their political ascension was based on the consolidation and advance of the new or modified social classes associated with the professional troops. At the beginning of the transformation, they were the szlachta of the professional hireling cavalry in Poland and in Muscovy they were men of the landed territorial cavalry, the pomeshchiks. These two classes dominated the Polish and Muscovite social hierarchy until the 19th century, however their function in the political regime developed under further military changes.

At the end of the 15th century in Poland, the monarchical power, cooperating with the Diet, Sejm, was controlling the military of the professional armies. In the middle of the 16th century, the magnate groups associated with the professional military ascended to control the Polish Diet and take over the royal domain.

At the end of the 16th century, the supreme general of the standing army, Crown Hetman Jan Zamoyski dominated the monarchical power and legislative and determined the royal election by the actions of the standing troops at his disposal.

In the second half of the 15th century in Muscovy, the grand princes controlled the new territorial cavalry army indisputably via their military chancery. In the middle of the 16th century, the faction associated with the territorial cavalry army overturned the government and established the army as the leading political estate.

At the end of the 16th century, the supreme generals of the Muscovite army, Ivan Shuysky and Nikita Yurjev ran the government in Muscovy and decided the succession of the throne by the pressure of the standing troops under their command.

The political rise of the commanders of the professional armies was the leverage of military power over society. They subjugated the society to war by harsh mobilization of resources and enforced on people the objectives of expansion. The military dictators also reshaped and mutilated the social groups and political institutions if they hindered their warmongering ambitions. They did it not virtually but physically, as Zamoyski did when his troopers pressed the mutinous szlachta at the Sejms, and kidnapped and beheaded the leader of szlachta liberty Samuel Zborowski in 1584.

Shuysky and Yurjev did so when their troopers shot over the Sobor crowds’ heads and chased them out of the Kremlin with their halberds. If the combat-seasoned military comes to power what else can one expect? The ascension of the professional armies to positions of power over societies is the important nature of the military revolution cycle. The grab of the political institutions by the professional military is the tool of this domination.

The social reaction to the military changes

The rise of the “non-social” professional forces became the impetus for a very profound political change, the estate corporatization of sovereignty. The takeover of the Polish and then Lithuanian sovereignty from the monarchy by the corporation of nobility, which started in the Thirteen Years War in the middle of the 15th century with the Nieszawa Statutes, intensified in the period of the Starodub campaign of 1535 and accomplished its objectives with the Pacta Conventa a century later.

The conversion of the royal power into the elected office was its high point. It is only one example of the corporatization of sovereignty. In Muscovy, under the rigid crust of the seeming autocracy that often misguides researchers, the transfer of political power from the monarchical to the estate corporative institutions was similarly intensive. It started during the Ugra standoff in 1480 when the first Diet of the estates’ representatives was constituted, and it intensified after the battle over the Rostislavl fords in 1541. In the darkest years of Tsar Ivan IV’s terror, the Muscovite Diet, Sobor, government, Duma, and local gentry commissions increased their control over the state authority at all levels at a rate that only the tsar’s violent demeanor limited their “absolutism.” The conversion of the tsar’s power into elected office soon after Ivan IV’s death was another example of the corporatization of sovereignty. It was the main means of social adaptation to the military changes. It served society to absorb the new social groups strengthened by the military changes, and accommodate them without breaking the existing social order completely.

In some moment, comforting to the strengthened social groups, the political regimes tended to reduce social mutability preventing society from losing its cohesion. We have seen exactly this move in the Polish and Lithuanian regulation on the eve of the Starodub War in the 1530s and the Muscovite regulation in the aftermath of the Rostislavl battle in the 1540s. This conservative solution was temporary and fragile because the pressure of the military changes was increasing.

The corporatization of sovereignty was not the highest point of the political transformation in the first circle of the military revolution. Further development of the standing armies led to the ascendance of their commanders to the top ranks of political power and the establishment of the oligarchic military dictate under the disguise of the Republic of Nobles in the Polish-Lithuanian case and tsar autocracy in the Muscovite case. The oligarchic military dictate was the highest point of the corporatization of sovereignty, a dictatorship based on the use of the standing armies as the political tool to subjugate the societies to the necessities of war.

Another way was to give up (as in the Crimean case) or delegate (as in the Lithuanian case) sovereignty to the outer masters (respectively the Ottomans and Polish szlachta-magnate corporation). It was like a closing-eyes-to-horror game because the challenge of the transformation was inevitable.

Mark Charles Fissel asks, “did the ruling classes (e.g., the nobility) adapt and exploit the transformation to the fiscal-military state allegedly caused by the military revolution?” Yes, they did, if the nobility kept controlling the extraction and allocation of resources for war, strategic direction and the command of the armed forces. It is the case when the nobility arrogated sovereignty and established an oligarchy based on the standing army, corporate military dictatorship. Alas, this kind of social adaptation to the military changes did not survive for long. Oligarchy was the regime with which the emerging East European nations came through the stage of civil war, the second circle of the military revolution, to collapse.

The dictating minority

One of the prime rules of social revolution is the claim that it is the active minority that accomplishes the overthrowal of the existing social order, not the passive majority. Furthermore, it is the minority that dictates the new political regime. Is this social rule invalid for the military revolution? No, it isn’t. The numerical domination of the cavalry with its “feudal” lineage in the forces of the East European countries did not mean that it was decisive on the battlefield or central in the nation’s military build-up.

The cavalry was also not a kind of force that produced the strongest impulses toward the socio-political transformation by the end of the 16th century. The innovative minority of forces, gunpowder infantry and artillery, were driving the transformation while the traditional majority of the cavalry dragged behind. For Robert Frost, the “cavalry was […] vital for the conduct of warfare […] on the great plains of Eastern Europe [because] infantry was fundamentally vulnerable without the protection of cavalry.” In the East of Europe as well as in its West, combat was fought not on the plains but on fields, much more limited terrain. Eastern Europe besides the steppes was less favorable for cavalry warfare than Western Europe.

It was a plane of forest, swamps, rivers, and ravines, with small tilled plots interspersed between them, while roads, bridges, forest and swamp passes were virtually absent. Eastern Europe enjoyed fewer good fields than Western Europe for the deployment of large cavalry masses where the cavalry could have used its potential to maneuver and shock. The East-European generals spent much effort driving the enemy to the rare terrain suitable for deployment of their large cavalry armies. Nevertheless, they stuck to the cavalry and did not want to change it for infantry despite the latter being much more suitable on East European battle terrain. Why?

One answer is the adhesion to the operational warfare that the East-European armies inherited from the style of war of the former warfighting hegemon of the subcontinent, the Mongolian Golden Horde. The raiding frequently in Eastern Europe had the nature not of a Kleinkrieg but an operational warfare. The second answer is more intricate and seemingly absurd since the reason for the East-European numerical cavalry dominance was the high fighting capability of the subcontinent’s infantry after it adopted the firearms and wagon-camp array.

Due to the wagon-camp array (wagenburg, tabur, oboz), the East-European infantry was better protected against the cavalry than the West-European infantry which utilized the pike formation and light fences. Since the battle of Kletsk in 1506, the warfighting history of Eastern Europe is full of the wagon-camp infantry array’s victories over the cavalry of all regional varieties, including armored lancers, mailed swordsmen and light archers. The opposite outcomes are rare and due to special conditions.

Despite the numerical superiority of the East-European cavalry the outcome of most of the destiny-forging battles in Eastern Europe was determined by the action of the infantry with firearms deployed in the wagon-camp array. The outcome of sieges was also determined invariably by the action of the professional infantry and not the dismounted cavalry. The numerical abundance of the cavalry mustn’t disturb historians when they look for the military revolution in Eastern Europe.

As we have sought, the infantry with firearms, amphibious forces, artillery and fortifications of the gunpowder epoch were the military revolution’s agent on the battlefield and its leverage over the socio-political transformation.

The concept of the military revolution has nothing in common with technological determinism because military affairs sort out the technology through the filter of victory and defeat that are unpredictable. Fighting is a kind of human activity with a notably tortuous outcome.

Before combat, it is impossible to judge for sure what kinds of weapon, organization of troops, tactics and leadership will be victorious and what kinds are doomed. The political leaders were unable to choose and develop the kinds of troops and weaponry that were victorious because they were an enigma. However, when the victorious practice establishes itself due to a chain of victories, the troops that produce it retain the leverage to guide, first, the military development and then the socio-political transformation.

If the society and political regime did not follow the guide, the new kinds of warfare change them automatically and if they were not changeable the new kinds of warfare would destroy them. At the beginning of the first circle of the military revolution, the new kinds of cavalry warfare linked to the professional forces transformed the political regime and social constitution of Poland and Muscovy. While at the end of the circle, the new kinds of warfare linked to the gunpowder infantry moved to destroy their political regimes and social constitution through civil war.

The Muscovite doom during the Time of Troubles came from the domestic Cossacks and frontier migrants that utilized gunpowder warfare as well as the Ukrainian Cossacks who brought the doom on the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth during the Deluge. The union of the Muscovite urban centers financed the army of the domestic Cossacks to resurrect the state power in Muscovy with absolutist potential. Nobody of this sort could be found to resurrect the Commonwealth due to the suppression of the towns by the magnates and szlachta and ethnic-religious alienation of the Ukrainian Cossacks by the Republic of Nobles. In both realms, Muscovy and the Commonwealth, the cavalry-based social class of the gentry looked like the military majority and were politically dominant but their history had been shaped by the marginal’s and commoner’s infantry with firearms.

Towards the stage of civil war

The Polish, Lithuanian, Muscovite, and Crimean battlefield innovations produced the mighty socio-political transformation in the same way as the West-European battlefield innovations produced them. Their main similarity was in the development curve bending to civil war by the end of the first circle of the military revolution cycle, a notion established by Jeremy Black.

Probably, the corporatization of sovereignty, oligarchic government and the military leaders coming to power was not only the East-European socio-political trend but the form of pan-European progress as well. This trend requires wider comparative research to become more than just an observation.

When Jan Glete compares Spain and Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth as the two powers that failed to implement the model of the fiscal-military state, he affirms that the latter unlike the former “never had a strong permanent army or navy.” Of course, it is an error imposed by historiographic routine and we have witnessed the large regular standing army that King Stephan Batory fielded against Muscovy and his Chancellor Jan Zamoyski employed to maintain his dictatorial power, to seat the pretender he liked on the throne and deal with the Ottoman rivalry in Moldavia and Ukraine, and Swedish rivalry in the Baltics, in a way he approved of. Why was Muscovy, with all its autocracy defined by Marshall Poe, not able but Poland-Lithuania, with all its republicanism declared by Robert Frost, was able to support five years in a row the army of some 40,000 to 80,000 professionals plus the regional forces? Was Poland-Lithuania more a fiscal-military state than Muscovy? Were any of them a fiscal-military state?

Neither the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth nor Muscovy were fiscal-military states in the first circle of the military revolution cycle. Chester Dunning and Norman Smith insist that Muscovy was a fiscal-military state in the 16th century due to the steady growth of its “central state fiscal and military administration” as revealed by Poe. Their supposition contradicts at least two principal conclusions that were made by John Brewer, founder of the concept of the fiscal-military state in his on-case study on the English state from 1688 to 1783, and Jan Glete, the concept’s advocate for wider research in the Early Modern Period. First, the establishment of the fiscal-military state was not a gradual accumulation of the fiscal and military craft, but a revolutionary implementation of the models that had been invented before but were abandoned due to the absence of the suitable socio-political conditions. The implementation required the social upheaval and change of the political regime, the Revolution in England, the breaking-out of Sweden from the Kalmar Union and revolt against the Hapsburgs in the Netherlands.

And second, the establishment of the fiscal-military state required the dominant social group to be interested in the standing army and military expansion. Although Brewer avoids nominating the particular economic and political beneficiaries of the English fiscal-military state, his narrative points out the social groups linked to the merchant activity, industry and urbanization, and landed gentry. Glete considers that the Dutch fiscal-military state was induced by the demand of the Republic’s broad elite and entrepreneurial middle class. And the Swedish fiscal-military state was like a joint venture of the protection-selling Vasa dynasty and the peasantry buying protection with a minor share to the noble-officials of the army, navy and administration. Glete abstains from pointing out the upheaval that accelerated the fiscal-military development in Hapsburg Spain, he also did not define the social groups which were interested in the Spanish imperial venture. Maybe the bare dynastic start of this venture and hesitation of its social base were the cause of the venture’s collapse.

In 16th century Muscovy, neither the conditions to implement the model of the fiscal-military state nor a strong enough social base for it existed. Although Chester Dunning considers Muscovy “a somewhat primitive but highly effective version of the fiscal-military state” in the 16th century, he profoundly demonstrates that the Muscovite society split over the limits of state power and resource mobilization.

Fig. 13. Tsar Michael (Mikhail) I is normally considered a weak co-ruler of his father the Orthodox Patriarch of Moscow Filaret (Feodor) Romanov. However, it was his reign when the Muscovite model of the fiscal-military state was implemented with the sound effect of the expansionist transformation of Muscovy into the Russian Empire. An un- known artist, equestrian portrait of Tsar Mikhail Fedorovich, the second half of the 17th century.

The State Historical Museum, Russia, via the Google Cultural Institute. The picture is authored by Crisco 1492, public domain, Wikimedia Commons

Society and its political regime were far from a consensus to implement the fiscal-military model and so drifted into civil war. The social groups that could be associated with the standing army, firearms and expansion were alienated by society. They were the frontier military, colonizing garrison-communities and merchant-entrepreneurs of exploration and trade, who were marginal to the Muscovite societal mainstays of power. And it was the allegedly “progressive” bureaucracy associated with the class of cavalry servicemen which alienated them.

The weakness of the Muscovite fiscal-military model became apparent when Boris Godunov, a courtier and civil official, and non-military man, overthrew the military oligarch Ivan Shuysky with the support of Moscow’s urban community and the Orthodox Church and ascended as the ruler of Muscovy in 1586. Godunov’s agents poisoned Shuysky by smoke while sailing on a riverboat and the army’s commanders adherent to Shuysky were sacked. Probably it was exactly the point when the Muscovite fiscal-military model, that had been invented and tested by Tsar Ivan IV the Terrible and his Chancellor Andrey Shchelkalov, was rejected and shelfed. Boris Godunov’s rulership and reign as the elected tsar after the Rurikid dynasty died out, transferred Muscovy into the stage of civil war.

In the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, only the magnates colonizing the Ukraine, the frontier szlachta serving in the standing corps of the border defense, and the Ukrainian Cossacks as the militant corporation of the colonization movement, could be associated with the model of the fiscal-military state developed by King Stephen Bathory and Jan Zamoyski. This model was fiercely opposed by the non-colonizing magnates and broad szlachta. Envious royal power looked to the Ukraine as its powerhouse. However, Poland had a social constitution and political regime much more rigid than the Lithuanian arrangement.

Poland was unable to accommodate and tame the Dnieper Cossackdom in the same way that the Lithuanian rulers had started to do. The Polish Republic of Nobles alienated them by imposing on the Cossacks the ethnic, religious, status and property regulations that fundamentally opposed Cossack values. The Republic of Nobles’ approach to the Dnieper Cossackdom began the countdown to civil war but few people in the Commonwealth were alerted by its repeated alarms. The social consensus about the implementation of the fiscal-military model was absent in the Commonwealth as similarly it was to Muscovy.

Sigismund Vasa, whom Jan Zamoyski brought to the throne after the death of Stephen Bathory after the victory at Byczyna in 1588, became Zamoyski’s wrong choice. The king had a strong personality and harsh temper, and did not play the role of puppet of Zamoyski. At the Sejm in 1591, responding to Zamoyski’s accusation of being a “tyrant,” the king declared that he refused to be commanded by the “usurper” Zamoyski.

The conflict between Sigismund Vasa and Zamoyski prevented the Polish political regime from obtaining the concentration of power either by the Vasas’ royal absolutism or Zamoyski’s dictatorship. After Zamoyski’s death in June 1605, a fierce struggle followed between the magnate factions over the dictatorship, known as Zebrzydowski’s rebellion, or rokosz. Probably it was exactly the point when the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth’s fiscal-military model, that had been invented and tested by King Stephen Bathory and his Crown Hetman Jan Zamoyski, was abandoned.

Was the first circle of the military revolution cycle in Eastern Europe a part of the revolution or was it the pre-revolution? It seems the second conclusion is more accurate because, despite firearms, bastions or similar fortifications, it was professional armies and the rise of infantry that were the striking military innovations but they did not overturn society and political regimes. Society was able to restrain their impact inside the loose pockets of the existing social structure. The political regimes adapted to the military innovations employing the corporatization of sovereignty, oligarchic government and military dictatorship.

The models of the fiscal-military state were invented but rejected, and the social classes associated with them were alienated. Warfare exploited society but did not transform it decisively. Civil war was necessary for that ground-breaking transformation.