During the 16th century pike formations would duke it out in melee combat but over the decades the percentage of shot increased. At what point did it battles start to revolve mainly around shooting each other rather than clashing pikes?
PS, Generally pike and shot thread
PPS, is the English civil war worth reading about?
bump
Maurice's reforms or Gustavus Adolfus' reforms.
So 1600-1630 would be the moment when it changed to musketry duels?
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Pike and Shot was huge in the early to mid 1600's
The 1500's actually saw the last of true medieval warfare.
I asked when it became more about muskets shooting each other rather than pike blocks clashing. Would would you call the last battle where this happened?
The late 1600's and early 1700's was when pike and shot went out of style. With the invention of the bayonet, pikes became pretty much obsolete.
Not him, but I think that puts the cart before the horse.
A bayonet is nowhere near as good as a pike for dedicated hand to hand fighting. If we took a Napoleonic wars regiment (from anyone, really) took away all their ammo, and told them to charge against a Swiss pike formation from the 15th century of equal numbers, I'm betting on the older pikemen to win, and win easily. Pikes are longer, better balanced, and don't have any hollow parts to fire lead projectiles out of.
The reason there's an impetus to have bayonets at all is that you want your guys who are shooting to be able to defend themselves. You only really see a need for a bayonet when you'd rather have 2 guys who can both shoot and defend themselves than one guy who shoots and another guy with a better hand to hand weapon who can protect him.
But that in turn, implies a lethality to the shooting that had to develop. If your guns aren't that good, you're probably better off specializing into actual dedicated hand to hand soldiers alongside your guys with guns. It's only as guns get better that the marginal addition of more shooters becomes worth the cost in hand to hand capability.
I don't thin pikes were as much as obsolete as less practical. By arming your soldiers with pikes, you lost firepower and your ability to spread your troops to maximize damage. I read somewhere that in the napoleonic era there were talks of giving line infantry foldable pikes to defend themselves from cavalry charges more effectively, so there's it. The reason why pikes were used in the first place was to protect musketeers and conserve firepower. With the invention of the flintlock and the bayonet, there was no need for pikes anymore not because they were obsolete, but because they would spread your resources too thin, similar to what happened with body armor. XVIII century line infantry could have perfectly been armed with full metal plate or at least cuirass (like pikemen during the XVII century) and they would have been more protected from shrapnel and cavalry charges, but that wasn't economically feasible because their function in battle was to spread firepower, not resisting charges. Same goes with pikes, if you give 2000 pikes to your infantry, that means you lose 2000 muskets that could be firing and keeping the enemy at bay.
Pic related, early attempts to maximize firepower by keeping your shooters alive.
Various innovations, most notably the flintlock, in a lifetime they went from pike and musket of the English civil war to Marlborough and it remained more or less unchanged until the napoleonic era.
French élan>Spanshits """unbreakable""" tercio
>t. Pierre
not it's tercio > élan
t. Gonzalez
>WE WUZ TERCIOS N SHIT
Just remember your kings are Bourbons.
t. jean-claude
>Spain gets a french king
>They suddenly turn into surrender monkeys
It really makes me think...
You should know how to properly write you own surname then.
Gonzales is the South American version, it appeared as the 'th' sound isn't normally found in American dialects.
Any good resources on P&S warfare, tactics, etc?
We don't really learn much about it in the land of the free, and those Spanish squares are giving me the vapors.
It's damn sexy fellow ameribro. You should read up on how Maryland & Virginia fought each other during the English Civil War. Shit was weird in America.
It's a misspelling ("""common variant"""). Most names in Latin America retain their spelling even if the 'z's are pronounced as 's's.
The Osprey books about it are pretty good. Look for Pike and Shot Tactics 1590-1660 and the Thirty Years War one.
Never, The Bayonet/Grenade is what wins and always will win battles.
Shooting is just foreplay, the Assult is the real action.
What you must understand is that musketeers and pikemen did not always move around as a single unit. The only thing a pikeman did better than a musketeer was defend against horsemen. When there was no threat of horsemen, the pikemen were frequently left off. If you look at the primary sources you can find examples of harquebusiers blasting at each other for hours without ever coming to hand blows as early as the 1540s, and perhaps earlier. By the 1580s/1590s there were several military manuals commenting that most battles ended before coming to handstrokes and were decided solely by shooting.
>By the 1580s/1590s there were several military manuals commenting that most battles ended before coming to handstrokes and were decided solely by shooting.
I remember reading that urban warfare was mostly that. During the ECWs there were conflicts where battles would last a few days because musketeers would shoot and cover in houses and wedges. The fact that the flintlock wasn't invented yet also meant that you couldn't shoot at night without risking being spotted before you could fire, wich meant you had to cover in order to surprise the enemy.
>English civil war
I like French religious wars better
I read up on it a bit and was surpised to find Swiss Mercenaries and Landsknechte duking it out with French Knight riding across the battlefield too.
Most cities don't even have the modern star fortress look yet.
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