Military drill. Although the musket had a much lower rate of fire than the bow and arrow, it struck with much greater force. The complex firing procedure led to the development of the military drill. Organizing, supplying, and training large numbers of soldiers armed with guns reinforced political trends toward centralization.

Fortification. As the castle fell to the cannon it was replaced by a complex system of fortification with projections known as the trace italienne. While effective as a defensive system it proved to be extraordinarily expensive.

By the fourteenth century Europe had recapitulated some but not all of the earmarks of the earlier civilizations. Agriculture had been intensified, the population grew, urbanization took hold, building (in the form of the soaring cathedrals) became ever more monumental, and higher learning was institutionalized. But in a rainfall environment that forestalled the need for public works to build and maintain a system of hydraulic agriculture, neither a centralized authority nor a universal corvée came into being. Only later, beginning in the sixteenth century, did these components of civilization arrive on the European scene. The historical dynamic that produced those consequential innovations was a sweeping military revolution that was, like Europe’s agricultural system, cathedrals, and universities, a unique development.

Gunpowder technologies originated in Asia. The Chinese invented gunpowder in the ninth century ce and developed fireworks and rockets before 1150. By the mid-1200s Chinese armies employed Roman candle–style “fire lances” and explosive bombs thrown by catapults, and by 1288 the Chinese created metal-barreled guns. In an early instance of technology transfer the Mongols acquired gunpowder technology from the Chinese, whence it probably passed into Europe across the steppes of central Asia. Possibly through contact with Chinese engineers and technicians, the technology also passed into the Islamic world, as gunpowder was used against European Crusaders in 1249. Europeans may also have learned of the technology from travelers in the East like Marco Polo who worked for the Mongol emperor in China from 1275 to 1292.

While gunpowder and early firearms technology originated in China, large cannon seem to have originated in Europe in the decade 1310–20. The technology then spread quickly back to the Middle East and Asia, cannon finding their way to Islam by the 1330s and to China by 1356. By 1500 the manufacture of guns had become a universal technology in the Old World with centers in China, the Moghal empire in India, the Ottoman empire, and Europe, and these powers further spread cannon technology to client-states throughout the Old World.

Early cannon and bombards were huge. Turkish guns deployed in the siege of Constantinople in 1453, for example, were so large they were cast on the site and could not be moved. “Mons Meg,” a cannon cast for the duke of Burgundy in 1449, measured almost 10 feet long, weighted 17,000 pounds, and threw a stone ball of nearly two feet in diameter. Probably because they became engaged in a more intense cycle of competition, European military engineers and foundrymen actively developed the technologies of cannon-making, and with a superiority of gun design, Europeans soon surpassed their Asian counterparts from whom they initially learned the technology. The great size of guns— suitable for battering walls of established fortifications—gave way to smaller, relatively portable bronze and then to much less costly castiron cannon, especially after 1541 when the English mastered techniques of casting iron cannon under the initiative of King Henry VIII. Smaller cannon not only proved more mobile on land, they produced powerfully changed conditions when brought aboard ships.

Already in the fifteenth century, gunpowder and firearms began to play a decisive role on the battlefields of Europe, and by the end of the century they had transformed the politics, sociology, and economics of war. The “gunpowder revolution” undermined the military roles of the feudal knight and the feudal lord and replaced them with enormously expensive gunpowder armies and navies financed by central governments. The knight was not made useless by the new weaponry. In fact, knights continued to proffer their services and to maintain retinues of archers and pikemen. But neither knights nor noblemen could master the economic dimension of the revolution in warfare, for the new artillery lay beyond the means of any individual captain or lord and could be financed only by royal treasuries. At the outset of the Hundred Years’ War (1337–1453), the primary means of combat remained the longbow, the crossbow, the pike, and the armored knight mounted on an armored charger. At the end, gunpowder artillery won out.

The military career of Joan of Arc (1412–31) nicely illustrates this transition in military and technological history. Joan of Arc, an illiterate peasant girl of 17, could defeat experienced English commanders partly because artillery was so new that previous military experience carried little advantage, as is the case with any new technology not derived from accumulated knowledge and tradition. Indeed, her fellow commanders praised Joan especially for her keen ability to place artillery in the field. (In what has been labeled the “Joan of Arc syndrome,” it would seem that whenever a new technology appears on the scene, e.g., with computers, the young often surpass the old and may make significant contributions.)

The new weaponry appearing in Europe in the fifteenth century required large increases in the budgets of European governments. During the second half of the fifteenth century, for example, as the Military Revolution took hold, tax revenues in western Europe apparently doubled in real terms. From the 1440s to the 1550s, as a further example, the French artillery increased its annual consumption of gunpowder from 20,000 pounds to 500,000 pounds, and the number of French gunners rose from 40 to 275. Spanish military expenses went from less than 2 million ducats in 1556 to 13 million in the 1590s. To cope with these increasing expenditures Philip II of Spain tripled the tax burden on Castile and repeatedly repudiated the state debt, without ever meeting his military payroll on time.

The musket was introduced in the 1550s, and in their reforms Maurice and William Louis of Nassau instituted volley fire by extended rows of musketeers using standardized muskets and coordinated routines of loading and firing. Those reforms and standardized field artillery made for potent new armies from 1600. In the face of muskets and artillery, longbows, crossbows, broadswords, cavalry, and pikemen exercised diminished roles or vanished entirely from the scene of battle. Infantry, now bristling with handguns, once again became a dominant arm on the field of battle. As a result, over the next two centuries the size of standing armies of several European states jumped dramatically from the range of 10,000 to 100,000 soldiers. During the last 70 years of the seventeenth century alone the French army grew from 150,000 to perhaps 400,000 under the Sun King, Louis XIV.

Because cannon could reduce medieval castles and old-style city walls with relative ease, they mandated new and even more expensive defensive countermeasures that took the form of earthen ramparts studded with star-shaped masonry bastions known as the trace italienne. Fortified with guns of their own, these installations allowed a defender to rake the attacking formations. European governments poured money into the development of these new and expensive systems of fortifications, but they strained the resources of even the richest European states. Offense and defense alternated in an escalating pattern of challenge and response. Relentlessly, costs mounted and warfare became the province of centralized states.

Only larger political entities, notably centralized nation-states with taxing power or other mercantile wealth, could afford the new weaponry and its attendant fortifications. The Military Revolution, therefore, shifted power from local feudal authorities to centralized kingdoms and nation-states. The kingdom of France, for example—the most powerful of the early modern states in Europe—only emerged as an entity after the Hundred Years’ War in the fifteenth century. The related development of the musket and the standing armies that resulted after 1550 reinforced this trend, insofar as central governments ended up as the only agencies that could afford standing armies and that possessed the bureaucratic capabilities to organize, equip, and maintain them.

The substantial government assistance and intervention required by this historically unique military technology led European societies toward centralized authority. The Military Revolution introduced competition between states and dynamic social mechanisms that relentlessly favored technical development. The centralizing effects—social, political, and economic—were akin to those called forth by irrigation agriculture in the great hydraulic civilizations we have previously examined. Thus, Europe acquired, like Egypt and China thousands of years before, the full panoply of civilized institutions. From the fifteenth century onward, the creation of national armies and royal navies resulted in political centralization as inevitably as had the hydraulic projects of the ancient and medieval East. Arsenals, shipyards, and fortresses were maintained as state-owned and state-controlled public works, comparable to the dams and canals of hydraulic societies. And, beginning in the seventeenth century with the Swedish army of Gustavus Adolphus and later established as a national principle by the French Revolution, universal military conscription became the modern equivalent of the ancient corvée.

While Europe became increasingly centralized as a result of the Military Revolution, its ecology and geography precluded the rise of a cohesive European empire of the sort found in China, India, or the Islamic world. In comparison with the large-scale irrigation works of the East, which encompassed whole regions—the Nile Valley and the Euphrates-Tigris flood plain—a typical European military-political system, based on rain-watered agriculture, remained a more local affair in which a variety of ethnic, linguistic, and geographical factors combined to define a nation-state. As the primary outcome of the Military Revolution, then, a group of relatively centralized, competing nation states emerged in Europe. They became locked in political, military, and economic competition, none sufficiently powerful to wholly dominate the others. More than anything else, then, the jostling that ensued between and among Spain, Portugal, France, England, the Low Countries, Prussia, Sweden, and later Russia created unique conditions that made Europe a hotbed of conflict and, at the same time, technologically poised for a world-historical role.

Other evidence supports the argument for limited centralization in Europe. The decentralized character of feudal Europe prior to the Military Revolution provides one point of contrast. For another, the new military technology was inherently innovative and, in a complete reversal of the traditions that had characterized hydraulic civilizations, the risks among European states were highest for those that failed to change. Lesser political units or nations (such as Poland) that did not or could not adapt to the Military Revolution simply disappeared as political entities, swept up by larger, more powerful neighbors. Most telling in this regard is the general absence of pan-European institutions that could conceivably have united a European empire. The papacy and the Holy Roman Empire—that nominal remnant of the West Roman Empire that persisted in Europe from its creation in 800 until its dissolution in 1806—represent the most potent of such institutions. Had the ecology of Europe demanded centralized authority, either the papacy or the Holy Roman Empire might have supplied a supranational structure of governance. In the event, however, neither brought about a unified Europe, and both remained weak institutions compared to the nation-states that emerged. Even when hegemony became artificially imposed on Europe, it was inevitably short-lived, as in the case of the Napoleonic Empire, which barely lasted a decade before collapsing in 1812.

A second major outcome of the Military Revolution, alongside political centralization within Europe, was a wave of European colonialism and the beginnings of European global conquest. A revolution in naval warfare which accompanied military changes on land formed the technological basis of the process. In part, this revolution in naval warfare entailed the creation of a new type of ship and new techniques of naval engagement. The comparatively lightly manned, wind-powered Portuguese caravel and its successor, the galleon, came to replace the human powered oared galley, which required large crews and was typical of warships plying the Mediterranean. Similarly, whereas naval tactics for galleys such as that deployed by Turks and Christians in the battle of Lepanto in 1571 involved ramming and boarding, the emerging new style involved heavily armed gunned ships, artillery fire from broadsides and at a distance, and tactics to prevent boarding. Experts credit the defeat of the Spanish Armada sent against England in 1588 in part to the English having adopted broadside artillery fire “along the line” while the Spanish clung to the ramming and boarding techniques that had served them so well in the Mediterranean.

The development of the caravel/galleon shows how complicated technological change is in general. We must keep in mind that the players, the “actors,” do not know the outcomes beforehand. Some shipbuilder did not explicitly set out to build an oceangoing gunned ship. Rather, technical, social/cultural, and geophysical factors interacted to produce the new ship. For example, sails and rigging had to be improved, gun ports cut, and gun carriages developed and installed. Captains had to master the compass (another Chinese invention) and determine their latitude at sea (i.e., how far north or south they were), techniques not wholly mastered for sailing south of the equator until the 1480s. It was not enough, of course, to sail to Africa, the Indian Ocean, or the Americas, the trick was to get back to Europe, and for Vasco da Gama, as for Columbus, that involved mastery of the technique known as the volta, whereby ships sailing northward along the African west coast headed westward back out into the Atlantic until they picked up winds to blow them eastward back to Iberia. Technological change embodies complex social processes, wherein strictly technical issues (in shipbuilding, say) interact with social factors of all sorts to produce technical and social outcomes that cannot be foreseen in advance. The case of the gunned ship likewise makes clear that we cannot isolate an autonomous “technology” in the world and then investigate its separate impact on society.

The global results of this new technological capability were stunning. The Portuguese made their first contacts along the sub-Saharan coast of Africa in 1443 and reached the Cape of Good Hope in 1488. Vasco da Gama’s first voyage to the Indian Ocean by way of the Cape in 1497–98 involved four small ships, 170 men, and 20 cannon; he returned to Portugal with his holds full of spices extracted by force from Muslim and Hindu traders. Columbus sailed to the Indies in three small caravels. Hernán Cortés conquered Mexico in 1518 and 1519 with an expeditionary force of 600 men, seventeen horses, and ten cannon. Later European voyages deployed larger and more heavily armed flotillas, but Columbus’s, da Gama’s, and Cortés’s small forces were sufficient for successful voyages and set the pattern for European mercantilism and colonialism for 300 years.

Portugal and Spain were the early entrants, and later France, the Netherlands, England, and others joined the game. Their colonies, colonial rivalries, and mercantilist activities set the tone for European struggles abroad and at home through the eighteenth century. In 1797 the French colonial historian Moreau de Saint-Méry wrote that the great tall ships of his day carrying African slaves to the colonies and colonial products back to Europe were “the most astonishing machines created by the genius of man.” European navies provided the technical means for the West to force itself on the larger world. Experts posit that by 1800 European powers dominated 35 percent of lands, peoples, and resources of the earth.

What role did scientific thought play in this immensely consequential European development? The answer is essentially none. Some of the basic inventions (such as gunpowder and the compass), as we have seen, originated in China, where they were developed independently of any theoretical concerns. In Europe itself, with its established tradition of Aristotle, Euclid, and Ptolemy, none of contemporary natural philosophy was applicable to the development of the new ordnance or any of its ancillary techniques. In retrospect, theoretical ballistics might have been useful, but a science of ballistics had not yet been deduced; it awaited Galileo’s law of falling bodies, and even then the applicability of theory to practice in the seventeenth century can be questioned. Metallurgical chemistry could have been useful to foundrymen, but prior to the nineteenth century theory was limited, and alchemy seemingly had nothing to offer. Hydrodynamics, which might have applied to ship design, also lay in the future. The mechanics of materials, which later became a pivotal engineering science, was reconnoitered by Galileo and only applied in the nineteenth century. Scientific cartography probably did play a supporting role in early European overseas expansion, but navigation remained a craft, not a science. The gunners, foundrymen, smiths, shipbuilders, engineers, and navigators all did their work and made their inventions and improvements with the aid of nothing more (and nothing less) than experience, skill, intuition, rules of thumb, and daring.

Indeed, the causal arrow flew from the world of technology to the world of science, as European governments—like their Eastern counterparts— became patrons of science and provided government support for scientific research in the hope of technical and economic benefits. It is no accident, therefore, that the institutionalization and bureaucratization of science by European governments appears first in early modern Portugal and Spain. While now thought of more as a late medieval crusader and less as the great humanist patron of scientific exploration, the Portuguese prince Henry the Navigator (1394–1460) was responsible for the historic series of fifteenth-century Portuguese voyages of exploration along the coasts of West Africa. He did much to promote navigation and to launch Portugal’s maritime empire and, driven by the spice trade, Lisbon soon became the world’s center of navigational and cartographical expertise. The ruling Portuguese court patronized various royal mathematicians, cosmographers, and professors of mathematics and astronomy, and it created two government offices charged to administer Portuguese trade and to prepare maps. Expert Portuguese cartographers obtained employment internationally.

In Spain, from 1516 to 1598 the Holy Roman emperor Charles V, and his son, Philip II, governed the largest contemporary European empire. Stemming from its colonial rivalry with neighboring Portugal and from technical issues over demarcating the borders of the empire halfway around the world, in the sixteenth century Spain replaced Portugal as the predominant center of scientific navigation and cartography. In Seville the government-sponsored Casa de la Contratación (House of Trade, 1503) kept and continually revised the master-maps of Spanish overseas expansion. The position of Pilot-Major (1508) at the Casa superintended training pilots in navigation; the Cosmographer Royal (1523) was responsible for nautical instruments and charts; and in 1552 Philip II established a royal chair at the Casa in navigation and cosmography. Complementing the Casa de la Contratación, the Council of the Indies, the government body established in 1523 to administer colonial development, came to possess its own corps of royal cosmographers and administrators charged with various scientific and practical duties in the expansion of the Spanish empire. Spanish support for cartography and navigation culminated in the creation of an Academy of Mathematics founded in Madrid by Philip II in 1582 which taught cosmography, navigation, military engineering, and the occult sciences. A sign of the times: the engineering professor of fortifications received twice the salary of the leading university professor of philosophy.

The Spanish government also sponsored systematic and comprehensive geographical and natural history surveys of Spain and the Indies. Officers in the Council of the Indies circulated printed questionnaires and collected useful information on an unprecedented scale, and in the 1570s Philip II sent a historic scientific expedition under Francisco Hernández to the New World to collect geographical, botanical, and medical information. Spain and Portugal were the first European powers to deploy scientific expertise in the service of colonial development. Every succeeding European colonial power—Dutch, French, English, Russian—in turn followed the pattern of state support for science and colonial development established by Spain and Portugal. Thus, by dint of the Military Revolution, the institutionalization of science in early modern Europe began to resemble patterns established in other great civilizations.