Carroll Quigley - The Evolution of Civilizations

The masking effect between stages to which we refer was intensified by cultural lag. This means that in any single area, be it core or not, all aspects of the society do not start, stop, or proceed at the same times and rates. In general, change or innovation was earlier in the military and economic aspects than it was in the political, social, legal, or intellectual aspects. This can be seen quite clearly in the early sixteenth century and again in the late eighteenth century.

The last imperialist war of the first Age of Conflict was the series of struggles called the Italian Wars (1494-1559). These began with an excuse rather than a cause, just as the earlier Hundred Years' War (1338-1445) had done. The cause of both of these was the need for the institutionalized feudal system to wage war in order to make a living. In other words, war had become an end in itself, as is usually the case with any institution. The excuse given in 1338 for the English invasion of France, like the excuse given in 1494 for Charles VIII's invasion of Italy, was no more than that— just an excuse—a flimsy dynastic claim to a distant throne. But in each case hordes of unemployed nobles were eager to support such a claim, no matter how flimsy, for the sake of booty and payment for military service.

The first imperialist wars of the new Age of Conflict were the wars of Louis XIV, which began in 1667 and which continued, with interruptions, until after Waterloo in 1815. The excuses that Louis XIV gave for his wars were just about as flimsy as those which had been offered in 1338 and 1494 in the earlier Ages of Conflict, and were repeated in the last of these wars by Napoleon.

As far as our analysis goes, the Italian Wars of 14941559 should have been followed by a period of peace such as followed the Napoleonic Wars of 1803-15, since, in each case, a new period of expansion had begun. Let us note that expansion had fully begun even before these last imperialist wars commenced, since the second Age of Expansion began about 1440 and the third began about 1730. This was simply a result of cultural lag, and reflected a situation where older institutions continued to work for a war that newer instrumental developments had made unnecessary and unrewarding. A similar and parallel situation may be existing now, at the middle of the twentieth century, if we are endangered by imperialist war at a time when new instruments and techniques of peaceful expansion have already begun to function.

In the period 1815-1914, of course, there was an absence of imperialist war, and Europe was generally concentrating its resources and energies on expansion, and did so because the fact of expansion, especially the new industrialism, was too obvious for anyone to ignore the fact that it was more feasible to get ahead by peaceful methods than by warlike ones. But in the period of expansion from 1440 to 1680 this was not nearly so clear, chiefly because of cultural lag of behavior and thought patterns from the earlier Age of Conflict.

We have said that the Italian Wars began in 1494 as a typical imperialist aggression by the institutionalized feudal system. But the war changed its character after about twenty-five years, and became a balance-of-power struggle against Hapsburg hegemony. In 1494 the king of France was the aggressor; by 1520 the king of France was fighting for survival against a dynastic monster that had come into existence through a series of circumstances, some of them accidental, which had made the Hapsburgs the overwhelming power in Europe. Among these circumstances were the family arrangements that accumulated by inheritance a large number of important dynastic claims in the hands of Charles V of the Holy Roman Empire. Of almost equal importance was the accidental circumstance that the same Hapsburgs, as rulers of Mexico and Peru, were able to tap the immense resources of bullion of America at a time when the existence of mercenary armies made money equivalent to soldiers and thus to power.

The influx of American bullion that made the Hapsburgs a great military and political power without an economic or social system capable of supporting a hegemony of Europe had several results. By raising prices rapidly, it completed the ruin of the older nobility and any other persons on fixed incomes. At the same time this price inflation gave a great spur too economic (especially commercial) expansion and to the growth in wealth and influence of the bourgeoisie and richer peasants. Moreover, the revelation that the possession of money could make a dynasty powerful even without a sound economic and social system to support it fastened the mercantilist system, in a broader, more exploitative, way upon Europe. Political power supported by mercenary soldiers was used to regulate economic activities so that a favorable balance of trade would bring in sufficient money to hire mercenary soldiers and thus expand a dynasty's ability to control more taxpayers, get access to larger numbers of mercenary recruits, and to increase the favorable balance of payments.

These obsolescent ideas, which continued as a cultural lag during the course of the new, second Age of Expansion, ensured a continuance of imperialist wars even in the period of expansion. The struggle against Hapsburg hegemony that began after 1519 was ended with the Hapsburg political defeat in the Thirty Years' War (1618-48); the struggle against French hegemony in Europe that began in 1667 continued until 1815. But the interval between these two struggles, which should have been a period of peace, was not, because of economic struggles, such as the three Anglo-Dutch Wars, which were justified by institutionalized mercantilist ideologies.

Moreover, only local and sporadic movements toward democracy appeared in this period of expansion because the organization of military force and of political power was not such as to permit democracy to function. The Italian Wars of 1494-1559 were like a caldron in which a great variety of military ideas and tactics were thrown together and tested. Among these were the old mounted knight, the new infantry of English crossbowmen or Swiss pikemen, the even newer infantry of arquebusiers, the light cavalry (reiter) armed with "horse pistols," primitive artillery, and even a Spanish revival of the Roman legionary. From the competition of these various arms there emerged by 1559 a tactical combination of pike and arquebus that held the field for over two centuries. In this combination the pikemen defended the arquebusiers against charging horsemen, while the arquebusiers defended the pikemen against forearms. At first, slowness of reloading, which left arquebusiers in jeopardy from cavalry for long intervals, required a high ratio of pikemen in the unit, but the slow increase in rate of firing and the invention of the ring bayonet (which made each musketeer able "to act as his own pikeman") in 1690 led to the reduction and eventual elimination of pikes. But the use of muskets, either with pikes or bayonets for defense against cavalry, supplemented by artillery, remained a skilled task as long as guns remained muzzle-loading, spark-ignited weapons. Such skill could be obtained only from professional mercenary soldiers in the relatively small numbers that could be paid by dynastic monarchies in the mercantilist period. In this period this organizational feature of small, professional mercenary armies was reinforced by the fact that arms were handmade on a piece-by-piece basis and were thus too expensive for the average private citizen to obtain or for the public fisc to purchase on a mass basis. Accordingly, it is not surprising that political power remained concentrated in a narrow group who controlled this limited supply of weapons and did not spread to that majority who were relatively isolated from war and weapons and thus had no basis on which to establish any claims for participation in governmental functions.