So random thought that occured to me while listening to a podcast on the thirty years war. How did pikemen last so long on the European battlefield after the development of battlefield artillery? Surely with anything but the most rudimentary artillery a whole bunch of people packed together as tightly as possible with long sticks, which was so popular in the early modern battlefield, is just a sitting duck? And it doesn’t take too many (I say around one) cannonballs going though a tightly packed body of pikemen before it stops being a functioning unit, surely?
I think you are overestimating early artillery’s accuracy and effectiveness and underestimating infantry training and cohesion.
It wasn’t easy to effectively hit the enemy formation in ways that caused a lot of damage (you needed “grazing” shots that moved through the enemy formation instead of just plunging into the earth and killing 4 or 5 infantrymen if that (remember that they did not have effective explosive shells))
And the infantry of that time was trained, to stand and take it no matter what, and historically they did, staying in formation and able to maneuver after several cannon ball hits.
Presumably to counter cavalry charges, which stuck around long after firearms became common in the battlefield.
But surely thats not the case, wouldn’t a rolling cannon ball would be just as effective as flying one against a body of pikemen packed tightly together?
But a cannonball would not generally start rolling, the battlefield is not a perfectly level surface and generals try to put artillery on high ground, so you are shooting downhill and the shot simply buries itself in the soil.
All that changed with the arrival of mobile artillery and improved shells and cannon, and with that changes the use of pikemen started to fade.
They were there to protect slow-loading arquebuses/muskets. Often, a big guy waving a two-handed zweihänder sword would try to swat a hole in the pikes, but the Spanish kept a third type of soldier in the front with a smaller, more wieldy sword to fight that off.
(Or, a really brave soldier would take all the pikes into himself so his buddies could rush in. We had a poster named Arnold Winkelreid long ago)
Highly trained, the three-system unit (tercios) could move around but stay cohesive against slower moving and loading artillery, screened by cavalry also threatening the artillery. But by the Battle of Rocroi in 1641, artillery was fast enough to destroy the tercio squares, and muskets could drive off cavalry attacks.
That’s what I was coming in here to say… early on, the tercios were supreme, but as artillery and muskets were developed and became more effective, linear formations became much more useful in comparison to the blocky ones of the early tercio, and at some point, the pikemen were just so many targets to the enemy’s musket formations.
Look at all the the quick timestamps on this thread. Bunch war nerds we are, able to spell landsknecht without looking it up.
Anyway, pikes remained a mainstay for war on the cheap, well into the Industrial Revolution. The Irish always had a supply stashed in their roof thatches. Stonewall Jackson, thinking all Southerners had his same mindset, had thousands rusting away in Richmond for the Dixie Götterdämmerung
Yeah, I don’t think the OP appreciates how effective cavalry was against scattered infantry. A tight formation could hope to take a few rounds of cannon fire and still fight, but a loose formation set upon by cavalry was dead, dead, dead.
And even after muskets became efficient enough, then you had bayonets, so you still could count upon a Long Pointy Thing that you could use for defense in formation, or for closing in and sticking it to them, literally.