ABSTRACT
The European elite were in origin the men on horseback, the mounted knights who had dominated the battlefields of the Middle Ages. That special position was undermined by the Military Revolution. The Military Revolution undoubtedly affected the nobility's traditional power and function. A more serious and permanent challenge was in part an indirect consequence of the Military Revolution. The opportunities for members of the nobility to serve in the army significantly increased during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as a direct consequence of the Military Revolution. The European elite were never simply a military caste. Nobles also predominated in the newer, slightly different, and significantly more national military orders founded in various European states in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. A noble of Estremadura actually explained that he was inspired to join up in 1793 by his sense of his own lineage, as well as by honour and by revulsion against the French Revolution.
