Early modern warfare

Wars became longer and more destructive, often causing widespread civilian suffering: In Europe, Medieval castles were replaced by the "Italian style" fortresses, known for low, thick, sloping walls and star-shaped designs with bastions.

The proper use of the pike required complex operations in formation and a great deal of fortitude and cohesion by the pikemen, again making amassing large forces difficult.

By 1415, some infantrymen began deploying the first "hand cannons", and the earliest small-bore arquebuses, with burning "match locks", appeared on the battlefield in the later 15th century.

In virtually all major European battles during a period of 250 years (1400 to 1650), many soldiers wore extensive plate armour; this includes infantrymen (usually pikemen) and almost all mounted troops.

Since a firearm requires little training to operate, a peasant with a gun could now undermine the order and respect maintained by mounted cavalry in Europe and their Eastern equivalents.

By this time, only light-cavalry scouting units, "the eyes of the army", continued to wear front and back armour plates to protect themselves from distant or undisciplined musket-equipped troops.

For many years infantry formations included a mix of troops armed with both firearms to provide striking power and pikes to allow for the defence of the arquebusiers or musketeers from a cavalry charge.

For example, Henry II of France, even in the dawn of religious unrest and inevitable violence, could amass an impressive 20,000 men in total for his 1550 decade of war against Habsburg Spain, but Louis XIV, Sun King with the highest population in the Kingdom of France and by extension Western Europe could deploy up to 500,000 men into the field by 1700 in the War of the Spanish Succession with more at stake.

The Battle of Fontenoy with advanced presence of Louis XV saw over 100,000 men deployed on both sides ending 20,000 lives, almost half of which were French, and despite a French victory, France herself did not keep Dutch territory gained as peace was desired for the bankrupt kingdom, a layman translation meaning almost 10,000 deaths were rendered obsolete by said king who witnessed the horrors from afar just 3 years later with very few battles left in the Austrian conflict.

European monarchs with bitter rivalries would invest many resources into intense warfare which often resulted in mass death and destruction of innocent populations, such as the Sack of Rome where the Supreme Pontiff's life was endangered, a symbolic attack against God and Christendom.

For example, although the Swedish Army under Gustavus Adolphus was originally recruited by a kind of national conscription, the losses of the Thirty Years' War meant that by 1648 over 80% of its troops were foreign mercenaries.

After wars with Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, when he fought often against superior mounted troops, King Gustavus II Adolphus started using successfully cavalry melee charge more often instead of caracole like during Battle of Breitenfeld.

While in all previous eras, European navies had been largely confined to operations in coastal waters, and were generally used only in a support role for land-based forces, this changed with the introduction of the new vessels like the caravel, carrack, and galleon, and the increasing importance of international waterborne trade in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

The new caravels were large enough and powerful enough to be armed with cannons with which they could bombard both shoreline defenses and other vessels.The Ethiopian–Adal War was a military conflict between the Ethiopian Empire and the Adal Sultanate from 1529 until 1543.

The Imam Ahmad ibn Ibrihim al-Ghazi (nicknamed Gurey in Somali and Gragn in Amharic (ግራኝ Graññ), both meaning "the left-handed") came close to extinguishing the ancient realm of Ethiopia, and converting all of its subjects to Islam; the intervention of the European Cristóvão da Gama, son of the famous navigator Vasco da Gama, helped to prevent this outcome.

Imam Ahmed was the first African commander to use cannon warfare on the continent during the Adal's conquest of the Ethiopian Empire under Dawit II.

While the Chinese were undermined as the inferior empire due to lack of weaponry, their strict adherence discipline and tactical strategy led to them defeating the Dutch.

[11] Daimyō of the period, searching for any sort of new tactical edge over their regional rivals, were quick to acquire and have blacksmiths under their retinue, reverse-engineer and reproduce the early European firearms.

[10] This is most famously portrayed at the Battle of Nagashino in 1575, where Oda Nobunaga's 3,000 riflemen had handily dispatched the much larger Takeda clan cavalry force using the first recorded utilization of volley fire.

As with their small arms counterparts, many warlords wished to quickly adopt the weapon in order to gain an advantage over their contemporaries, but difficulties in producing suitable reproductions led to limited early usage in comparison.

As with personal firearms, Oda Nobunaga was early to adopt the new weapon, and later, after his death, one of his retainers Toyotomi Hideyoshi would use cannons to destructive effect to lay siege to Kanki Castle in 1582.

His descendants also employed gunpowder weapons in their expansion of the Mughal Empire, such as Akbar the Great at the second Battle of Panipat (1556) against Adil Shah Suri and Hemu of the Sur dynasty.

Specifically, the Ottoman Empire was slow to adopt innovations like boring cannon (rather than casting them in a mold), making the conversion from matchlock firearms to flintlocks, and the lightening of field guns and carriages.

David Nicolle theorizes that one contributing factor to the Ottoman reluctance to adopt the flintlock musket, despite its superiority over the matchlock ignition system, was the dusty climate of much of the Middle East which could cause problems with reliability.

It was a similar tactic to many growing empires, because it is understood that children are easily manipulated, and in order to maintain new territories guarded by the Janissary, they needed to have an easier population to mold.

The problem with this is that the Ottoman Empire made the Janissaries too powerful and because of their socialization, career advancement options, and recruitment procedures, the men in the units were very cohesive and respected each other more than the sultan.

His memoir is an important piece of history, but scholars and historians have widely debated the authentic nature of his stories and doubt the consistency of his tales.

[29] Although the cannon and musket were employed by the Ottomans long beforehand, by the 17th century they witnessed how ineffective the traditional cavalry charges were in the face of concentrated musket-fire volleys.

Furthermore, it consumes a great amount of powder, besides cracking and breaking the wheels and the carriages and even the ramparts on which it is placed ... our artillery is more handy and more efficient and here resides our advantage over the cannon of the Turks.

The raging and lengthy wars between Le and Mac dynasties, and later Trinh and Nguyen clans invoked an arm race between the opposing factions.