The development of state structures, particularly in western Europe, during the 16th and 17th centuries gave birth to strategy in its modern form. “War makes the state, and the state makes war,” in the words of American historian Charles Tilly. The development of centralized bureaucracies and, in parallel, the taming of independent aristocratic classes yielded ever more powerful armies and navies. As the system of statecraft gradually became secularized—witness the careful policy pursued by France under the great cardinal Armand-Jean du Plessis, duc de Richelieu, chief minister to King Louis XIII from 1624 to 1642, who was willing to persecute Protestants at home while supporting Protestant powers abroad—so too did strategy become more subtle. The rapine and massacre of the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48) yielded to wars waged for raison d’état, to aggrandize the interests of the ruler and through him the state. In this as in many other ways, the early modern period witnessed a return to Classical roots. Even as drill masters studied ancient Roman textbooks to recover the discipline that made the legions formidable instruments of policy, so too did strategists return to a Classical world in which the logic of foreign policy shaped the conduct of war
For a time, the invention of gunpowder and the development of the newly centralized state seemed to shatter the dominance of defenses: medieval castles could not withstand the battering of late 15th- or early 16th-century artillery. But the invention of carefully designed geometric fortifications (known as the trace italienne) restored much of the balance. A well-fortified city was once again a powerful obstacle to movement, one that would require a great deal of time and trouble to reduce. The construction of belts of fortified cities along a country’s frontier was the keynote of strategists’ peacetime conceptions.
Strategy in the early modern period
