The Military Revolution and European 
Expansion 

Sources

 

Constant Warfare. Europeans in the age of exploration and expansion held a significant 
military advantage over nearly all of the people they encountered when they traveled to other 
parts of the globe. European military prowess grew largely from technological advances made 
by the major powers as they fought one another almost incessantly throughout the 

Renaissance era. Before 1350 Europe’s military technology was generally no more advanced 
than that which could be found among the other major civilizations of the late medieval 

world. As late as 1415 at the height of the Hundred Years’ War, English king Henry V led a 
highly successful invasion of France with a small army of only about eight thousand men. 

Moreover the most effective battlefield weapon during Henry’s campaign in France that year 
was the Welsh longbow, an efficient weapon for its time but hardly an engine of mass 
destruction. In short Europeans at the dawn of the Renaissance may even have been 
significantly behind the Muslims, Chinese, and other major world civilizations in their ability 
to make war. Nearly two centuries later, however, late-sixteenth-century European states 
often fielded armies then numbered in the hundreds of thousands, armed with much more 
destructive weaponry including artillery and primitive muskets. The dramatic transformation 
of European warfare in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries has been said by some historians 
to have constituted a military revolution. The elements of this revolution provide important 
clues to an explanation of how European states were able to build far-reaching empires in the 
Americas and around the globe in the age of exploration and expansion. 

Gunpowder and Firearms. Ironically the use of gunpowder and firearms in battle was not 
originally a European invention. The Chinese had discovered the correct formula for 
gunpowder as early as the ninth century a.d., and by the mid 1200s Chinese armies were 
already using metal-barreled cannon in battle. The earliest evidence of such artillery in 
Europe, by contrast, dates only to the mid 1300s. In addition to cannon European armies in 
the Renaissance era began to make use of primitive handheld firearms called arquebuses, the 
bulky precursors of the musket. Whether in China or Europe, however, the military usefulness 
of early firearms was limited by several factors. First, these early guns were dangerous to use; 
they were nearly as likely to explode in the faces of those firing them as they were to inflict 
damage on the enemy. Second, they had extremely limited range and accuracy compared to 
more-traditional missile weapons such as the longbow. Finally, the usefulness of early fire-
arms was limited by the length of time needed to reload. Whereas a well-trained archer could 
discharge up to ten arrows a minute, for example, it typically took a fifteenth-century 
arquebusier several minutes just to load his weapon once. Despite their limited effectiveness 
on European battlefields, Spanish conquerors in the sixteenth-century Americas always took 
along at least some firearms on their campaigns. Among the natives of the Americas who had 
never seen such weaponry, the roar of European cannon and muskets according to many 
reports frequently inspired fear and dread. 

THE BLACK LEGEND 

Spain was the first European state to establish a territorial empire in the Americas. Through 
the course of their conquests in the Caribbean, Mexico, and Central and South America, the 
Spaniards developed a reputation for cruel treatment of conquered Native American 

populations. Spain’s enemies in Europe (the French, Dutch, and English) exploited tales of 

Spanish atrocities in the New World to build a popular image of Spain as an “evil empire.” 
These stories collectively contributed to what historians call the Black Legend of Spanish 
cruelty. 

Spain’s reputation was partly deserved. It is true, for instance, that Spanish conquistadores 
and colonial settlers often treated conquered populations inhumanely. It is also true that the 

Native Americans died by the millions in the wake of Spain’s imperial expansion. The 
principal cause of death and suffering was not, however, Spanish weapons but rather the 
inadvertent introduction of Old World diseases such as smallpox and measles against which 
the populations of the Americas had no immunity. Far from celebrating the mass slaughter 
wrought by diseases among the American natives, Spanish authorities took whatever feeble 
steps they could to stop the epidemics. After all, the Spanish wanted more souls to convert to 
Christianity and more laborers to put to work, not more dead bodies. In general, official 
Spanish crown policies through the 1500s sought to protect the natives of conquered areas 
from abuse by Spanish settlers. From across the Atlantic Ocean, however, effective 
enforcement of royal policies proved impossible, and exploitation of conquered populations 
continued in many areas. 

Ironically it was a Spanish critic of these abuses who provided the fuel for the Black Legend 

as it spread across Europe: the Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas. Las Casas wrote a 

scathing book about his countrymen’s cruel treatment of the natives of the Caribbean islands 
titled The Devastation of the Indies: A Brief Account (1552). In the second half of the 
sixteenth century, his book was translated into French and English, and his stories of Spanish 
atrocities became the basis for popular disdain of the Spaniards in other areas of Europe. 
When France and England began to attempt to establish their own permanent colonial 
settlements in the Americas in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, they often 
expected to be welcomed by the Native American populations as protectors against the 
universally despised Spaniards. 

Source: Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain, and 

France c. 1500–1800 (New Haven, Conn. & London: Yale University Press, 1995). 

From Castles to Forts. Even if primitive Renaissance-era firearms rarely proved decisive in 
open battles, their effects on European warfare were nonetheless far-reaching. Over the 
centuries preceding the Renaissance, for example, the lofty walls of medieval castles had 
proven largely impenetrable from direct assaults by even the best-equipped European armies. 
Fifteenth-century cannon, however, could reduce even large and well-defended castles to 
rubble in a matter of hours. The advent of artillery in European warfare thus led to a radical 
transformation in defensive fortifications. Beginning in Italy in the late fifteenth and sixteenth 
centuries, Europeans began to abandon old medieval castle designs with their tall, thin walls 
and build instead new styles of fortifications characterized by low, thick walls that could 
withstand repeated barrages of cannon fire. Moreover the jagged outer works of these new-
style forts allowed defending garrisons to fire directly on any attacking army that approached 
its low walls. By the mid sixteenth century this new style of fortification in Europe had 

become quite effective in resisting assault. When applied by the Spanish and Portuguese to 
their growing overseas empires in the sixteenth century, this system of fortification provided 
bases of colonial operation that proved nearly impregnable. A well-preserved sixteenth-
century example of this sort of colonial fortification survives today in San Juan, Puerto Rico. 

Sources 

Geoffrey Parker, The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 

1500–1800 (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1988); 

Brian Tierney and Sidney Painter, Western Europe in the Middle Ages, 300–1475, third 
edition (New York: Knopf, 1978). 

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The Military Revolution and European Expansion

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