ABSTRACT
The issue of European military development in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries has recently been a matter of lively debate among historians. The historian Michael Roberts characterized the period as one of a “military revolution”:
By 1660 the modern art of war had come to birth. Mass armies, strict discipline, absolute submergence of the individual, had already arrived; the conjoint ascendancy of financial power and applied science was already established in all its malignity; the use of propaganda, psychological warfare and terrorism was already familiar to theorists, as well as to commanders in the field; and the last remaining qualms as to the religious and ethical legitimacy of war seems to have been stifled. The road lay open, broad and straight to the abyss of the twentieth century.1
