Copyright © Brian Sandberg 2016

The right of Brian Sandberg to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2016 by Polity Press

Polity Press

65 Bridge Street

Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press

350 Main Street

Malden, MA 02148, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-4602-2

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-4603-9(pb)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Sandberg, Brian, 1968- author.

Title: War and conflict in the early modern world : 1500–1700 / Brian     Sandberg.

Description: Malden, MA : Polity Press, 2016. | Series: War and conflict     through the ages | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2015035482| ISBN 9780745646022 (hardback) |     ISBN 9780745646039 (pbk.) | ISBN 9781509503018 (mobi) |     ISBN 9781509503025 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: War–History–16th century. | War–History–17th century. |     War and society–History–16th century. | War and society–History–17th     century.

Classification: LCC U39 .S26 2016 | DDC 355.0209/031–dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015035482

Typeset in 10.5 on 12 pt Times

by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited

Printed and bound in the UK by Clays Ltd. St Ives PLC

The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.

Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com

For John A. Lynn, mentor and friend

This book presents a global examination of the dynamics of war, culture, and society in the early modern period. Studying warfare and its incredibly complex history on a global scale presents a truly daunting task, however. War and Conflict in the Early Modern World is situated at the intersection of several competing approaches to the study of war, violence, and conflict in current and historical contexts.

The interrelated fields of military history and diplomatic history have long focused on the history of warfare through the study of states, their military systems, and their international relations. These “traditional” fields, shaped by the writings of Antoine-Henri Jomini and Carl von Clausewitz in the mid-nineteenth century, have tended to focus on major international wars fought between nation-states, narrating military operations, battles, and peace treaties. Military history and international relations history have continued to evolve, but a number of other approaches have greatly broadened notions of warfare and the study of its practices.

Historians of war and society began to incorporate social history methods in the late 1960s and 1970s, considering the social composition of armies and the relationships between military institutions and their political systems. John Keegan's The Face of Battle (1976) provided a powerful example of how historians could consider the experience of combat for ordinary soldiers in past wars.¹ Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, historians such as André Corvisier, John Shy, Michael Howard, John A. Lynn, Geoffrey Parker, Denis Showalter, and Brian McAllister Linn constructed a “New Military History” by embracing social history approaches as a way of uncovering broader realities of warfare beyond the conventional battlefield accounts and campaign narratives of previous military histories.² In the same period, social historians examined peasant revolts, revolutions, civil wars, crowd conflicts, bread riots, religious riots, and other forms of social conflict and organized violence – significantly stretching the academic study of war and conflict.

In the 1980s and 1990s, cultural history transformed the study of warfare and conflict even further. Cultural historians have examined rhetoric, language, and political culture in the context of revolutions, civil conflicts, and major wars. Cultural histories of war have expanded the historical “actors” in conflicts to consider reservists, logistical personnel, military wives, camp followers, refugees, indigenous peoples, and civilian victims of war. Historians such as Christopher Browning, Jeremy Black, Drew Gilpin Faust, Isabel V. Hull, Hervé Drévillon, and Wayne E. Lee have explored diverse aspects of war and culture within specific societies or in broader global and imperial contexts.³

Alongside these histories of warfare, a broader history of violence has been developed by anthropologists, sociologists, and historians who examine diverse manifestations of violence – often outside conventional wartime situations. Physical aggression remains important for violence studies, but some of these scholars explore psychological, economic, legal, gendered, and emotional dimensions of warfare. Elaine Scarry's pioneering work, The Body in Pain, contemplates bodily dimensions of violence, insisting that the primary purpose of war is to inflict injury on human beings.⁴ Julius Ruff, Neil L. Whitehead, Veena Das, Arthur Kleinman, Paul Virilio, and others have examined mass rape, dueling cultures, militarization, mechanization, and suffering in warfare.

Peace and conflict studies (or war and peace studies) have developed on a markedly different trajectory since the 1960s. This interdisciplinary field examines conflict resolution and peace implementation and has often been focused on contemporary cases, rather than historical analysis. Scholars such as Johan Galtung, Johannes Botes, Francis A. Beer, Larry J. Fisk, and Douglas P. Fry have pushed beyond diplomatic histories of ambassadors and international treaties to consider broader peacemaking processes. Historians are taking insights from peace and reconciliation processes in Ireland and South Africa to re-examine the dynamics of peacemaking in the past.

Serious tensions exist between these various methods of examining warfare. Proponents of each of these approaches sponsor their own conferences, journals, and publications – often producing divergent lines of research and fragmented debates. This book will confront these tensions through an exploration of early modern warfare, recognizing that specialists in different fields of study will undoubtedly challenge some of my methodological and coverage choices. This study cannot consider all the possible manifestations of violence, conflict, and warfare in the early modern world, however.

I will instead concentrate on organized armed violence, examining specific forms of violence that were prevalent during the early modern period. By organized armed violence, I mean physical violence and coercion organized by clans, communities, militant groups, military elites, organizations, and institutions at the civic, regional, or state level in order to wage armed conflict internally or externally. This approach emphasizes the importance of warfare and social conflict over interpersonal violence or economic conflict, but allows for a broad examination of diverse forms of violence within and between societies.

Despite my aspiration to compose a global history of warfare and my training as a comparative historian, I must acknowledge the difficulties and limitations that I have encountered in attempting to write a history of warfare in the early modern world. My own historical research focuses on early modern France, Italy, and the Mediterranean in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. My language skills confine my archival research to English, French, and Italian manuscripts, supported by broader reading of printed sources in these languages, as well as some Spanish and German sources. This book required me to stretch well beyond my research specialization to consider historical developments around the world across almost three centuries. The book thus necessarily relies heavily on the research and writing of other scholars across a range of specialized fields in early modern history.

Parts of chapters 6 and 9 are adapted from my article, “Beyond Encounters: Religion, Ethnicity, and Violence in the Early Modern Atlantic World, 1450–1700,” Journal of World History 17 (March 2006): 1–25. Portions of several chapters are adapted from my reviews of books by Maurizio Arfaioli, Stuart Carroll, Darryl Dee, Pablo E. Pérez-Mallaína, Jonathan Spangler, B. Ann Tlusty, and Matthew Vester.

My teaching of global and comparative courses, entitled “The Mediterranean World,” “The Renaissance,” “Religion in Early Modern Europe,” “The European Wars of Religion,” “Religious Violence in Global Perspective,” “Religious Politics and Sectarian Violence,” and “Western Civilization (1500–1815),” significantly shaped my understanding of war and conflict in the early modern world. I wish to thank the undergraduate and graduate students who attended my courses at Northern Illinois University for their excellent questions and comments. Graduate students and colleagues at the Université de Paris I (Panthéon-Sorbonne) and the Université de Paris IV (Paris-Sorbonne) provided invaluable reactions to my ideas and approaches during seminar and workshop sessions.

I thank my colleagues and audiences at numerous historical and interdisciplinary conferences for raising issues and providing crucial feedback that allowed me to write and revise this book. Research support and collaboration as a residential fellow at the Institut d'études avancées de Paris, as a Fulbright Research Scholar in France, and as a Solmsen Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Research in the Humanities of the University of Wisconsin at Madison shaped this project. A Franklin Grant from the American Philosophical Society, a Summer Research and Artistry Award from Northern Illinois University, sabbatical leave from Northern Illinois University, and assistance from the Medici Archive Project all provided crucial research support. I especially wish to thank the readers for Polity who offered detailed commentaries and constructive criticism on earlier drafts of this book.

This book was inspired by my studies on war and society with professors John Lamphear, Geoffrey Parker, and John A. Lynn. I thank them profusely, as well as my family and friends in Texas, Illinois, and Europe, who remained curious and inquisitive about the book as it gradually coalesced. I want to express my deepest appreciation to Laura Kramer, who read the first draft of the manuscript and provided vital feedback on it. Finally, I want to thank David Krugler, my good friend and writing collaborator, for all his support and encouragement throughout the long process of researching and writing this book.