Pike-and-Shot Fantasy Books

Pike-and-shot fantasy is fantasy set at the technology level of roughly 1500 to 1700, when pikemen and musketeers fought side by side, mercenary regiments caused more trouble than they were worth, and wars were fought over religion and dynasty. Very few books draw inspiration from this era. Good places to start are Ash: A Secret History by Mary Gentle, Hawkwood's Voyage by Paul Kearney and Gunmetal Gods by Zamil Akhtar.

The books

Before the flintlock came the matchlock: tercios, mercenary companies, sieges and the Ottoman frontier. These books borrow from the 15th to 17th centuries.

From the author of this site

This is the age I write about. If you want to see it with magic in it, my free novelette Only the Banners Change is set on a Cossack-style river frontier, where a small community has to pay tribute to the empire by sending it their boys. They are secretly drawn into war, partly against their will, by two of their leaders who want to save their own child. The magic in this world works only when people believe the same thing, which means manipulation risks an even deeper betrayal. You can get it by signing up to my newsletter. The first full novel, The Witch Field — Acceptable Loss, follows in 2027.

Pike And Shot – A Neglected Era

The pike-and-shot era is notoriously underappreciated in popular history, so as a historian studying this period, I'm not at all surprised that it has been neglected in fantasy as well. History, for many people, unfortunately goes something like this: ancient Greece – ancient Rome – Vikings – knights – British Empire – Napoleon – industrialization – First and Second World Wars – Cold War – present. Somehow, we get from knights to Napoleon without anyone having to explain where all the muskets came from.

Among the missing chapters are the Renaissance and the pike-and-shot era, roughly from 1500 to 1700. It's a complicated period in which adversaries often divide along religious lines rather than neatly corresponding to nation states. It is also essential to understanding how modern states developed and how European expansion reshaped the world.

Between the large empires of the period and along their edges lay wild frontiers and the people who lived on them: the Cossacks, the Grenzers, the large Arab nomad communities, the peoples of the Eurasian steppe and the settlers in the Americas. Even pirates would not be out of place on that list. It's one of the richest periods history has to offer, and it needs more love when it comes to fantasy.

What pike and shot was

On 2 March 1476, about 18,000 Swiss and their allies, most of them infantry, confronted the army of Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, near Grandson. On paper, Charles had plenty in his favor: formidable cavalry, powerful artillery and an enormous war chest. Days earlier, he had hanged or drowned the 412 men of the Grandson garrison after promising to spare them. But his cavalry failed to break the Swiss vanguard. When he ordered a withdrawal to better ground just as the Swiss main body arrived, the maneuver turned into a rout.¹ The Swiss took about 400 of his guns and so much treasure that they rioted over dividing it.² Apparently, military discipline only went so far once there was jewelry to divide. Less than a year later, Charles was dead outside Nancy, and the Swiss had given Europe's rulers plenty to think about.

The pike and the discipline to use it were a large part of the answer. At up to 5.4 meters, it could project well beyond a horseman's lance, and a deep square could put several rows of steel points between a charging horse and the men in the front rank.³ William Garrard wrote in 1591 that a pike square was "as hard to be pierced by a horse as an angry porcupine or hedgehog with the end of a bare finger."⁴ Pikes were also cheap, and basic pike drill could be taught much faster than the skills of a knight or a trained archer.⁵ So everyone copied the Swiss, the Landsknechts and the Spanish first among them.

Then the guns caught up. At Bicocca, on 27 April 1522, Swiss pikemen in French service charged across open fields under artillery fire, ran into a sunken road and earthworks, and were shot down by Spanish arquebusiers under Fernando d'Ávalos, with Frundsberg's Landsknechts dug in alongside them. Estimates put Swiss losses at more than 3,000 dead, against around 200 Imperial losses.⁶ Whether the Spanish already fired in organized rotating volleys is still debated.⁷ To my mind, the earthworks and the Swiss insistence on attacking before their supporting artillery was ready explain more than any new drill does.⁸ Guicciardini wrote that the Swiss went home "diminished in numbers, but much more diminished in audacity,"⁹ and Spanish gained a word: a bicoca is a bargain, something won cheaply.¹⁰

Bicocca didn't end the pike. It showed what happened when pikemen attacked a prepared position without enough support. On its own, a pike square was vulnerable to gunfire, including cavalry using the so-called caracole: riding up, firing their pistols and wheeling away. Shot on its own was vulnerable to a charge. Robert Barret, an English soldier who had spent most of his career among the French, Dutch, Italians and Spaniards, put it best: "The one without the other is weakened the better halfe of their strength."¹¹ The Spanish tercio, standardized in 1534, was built on that idea and dominated European battlefields for about a century.¹²

For a fantasy writer, that cooperation matters more than the spectacle of two hedges of spears grinding into each other. By the late sixteenth century, battles were increasingly decided by shooting, and much of the pike's work was protecting the men doing it.¹³

The next change was the (re)introduction of drill. From the 1590s, Maurice of Nassau and his cousins rebuilt the Dutch army into smaller, shallower units, drawing partly on Roman and Byzantine manuals.¹⁴ In 1594, Willem Lodewijk described the countermarch in a letter to Maurice: each rank fires and steps to the rear, so that "before the last ranks have fired, the first will have reloaded."¹⁵ Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden took it further with six ranks instead of ten, light regimental guns and salvoes.¹⁶ At Breitenfeld, on 17 September 1631, Tilly, who had sacked Magdeburg four months earlier, routed the Saxons within about an hour. The Swedish second line under Gustav Horn re-formed to meet him, and in the end it was Tilly's tercios that broke.¹⁷ It's easy to make too much of this. Three years later at Nördlingen, the tercios beat the Swedes decisively, and historians such as David Parrott and Geoffrey Parker warn against reading Breitenfeld as the death of the old system.¹⁸

The guns won in the end, but only slowly. At the start of the sixteenth century, perhaps a tenth of European infantry carried firearms; by the Thirty Years' War, it was about half.¹⁹ Around 1700, many European armies were abandoning the pike, and in 1704 Spain reorganized its tercios as regiments.²⁰ The socket bayonet allowed a musketeer to fire with a blade fixed beside the muzzle. The pikeman's job had become an attachment.

Two gunpowder ages

If you've read flintlock fantasy, it's tempting to think of pike and shot as the same world with older guns. They are really two different gunpowder ages. Flintlock fantasy usually borrows from the years between the Seven Years' War and about 1840: standing armies, national uniforms and line infantry with bayonets instead of separate ranks of pikemen. Pike and shot is the age before that, of armies often raised for a particular war, field signs alongside increasingly uniform clothing, and wars fought over religion and dynasty. Several of the military changes separating the two gathered pace between about 1650 and 1700.

These are broad contrasts in European warfare. Practices overlapped, and different armies changed at different times.

-——————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————- Pike and shot (c. 1500 to 1650/1700) Flintlock fantasy's age (c. 1750 to 1840) -—————————- — ——————————————————————————————————————————— — -——————————————————————————————————--- Infantry Pikemen fighting alongside arquebusiers and matchlock musketeers, in formations including tercios Line infantry with flintlock muskets and socket bayonets; separate pikemen largely gone

Cavalry Lancers, cuirassiers in three-quarter armor, reiters with wheellock pistols, Polish winged hussars Hussars, dragoons, lancers and cuirassiers; much less extensive armor, where worn

Who fights A mixture of permanent troops and forces raised for a war, including mercenary companies and regiments raised by military contractors Standing armies paid by the state, supplemented or expanded through wartime recruitment and conscription

Dress Varied clothing with field signs such as scarves, sashes and sprigs of foliage; growing use of regimental colors and uniform dress Standardized military uniforms are the norm

What the wars are about Religion, dynasty and territory: the French Wars of Religion, the Thirty Years' War, the Ottoman frontier Empire, dynasty and revolution: the Seven Years' War, the American and French revolutions, Napoleon

The wider world The Renaissance, European oceanic expansion, the conquistadors and colonies in the Americas Global empires, the Enlightenment, early industrialization -——————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————-

The break, c. 1650 to 1700. Several of the changes cluster around these fifty years:

• The Peace of Westphalia ends the Thirty Years' War in 1648.

• Uniform dress becomes increasingly common during the later seventeenth century. Earlier experiments included Swedish infantry under Gustavus Adolphus and the New Model Army's red coats from 1645.

• Flintlocks increasingly replace matchlocks as standard infantry weapons.

• The socket bayonet helps end the pike. Earlier plug bayonets fitted inside the muzzle and prevented firing. Socket bayonets, introduced in the later seventeenth century, allowed musketeers to keep firing with the blade attached. Hugh Mackay's innovation after Killiecrankie in 1689 was a ring fitting, rather than an uncontested invention of the socket bayonet.²¹

These changes also sit within a longer debate about the military revolution. Michael Roberts called 1560 to 1660 a "great divide separating medieval society from the modern world";²² Geoffrey Parker stretched the military revolution to 1530 to 1710.²³ Neither span gives us a neat boundary between two fantasy settings, but both help explain how much changed between them.

Bibliography

Primary sources

Barret, Robert. The Theorike and Practike of Moderne Warres. London, 1598.

Barwick, Humphrey. A Breefe Discourse, Concerning the Force and Effect of All Manuall Weapons of Fire. London, c. 1592.

Garrard, William. The Arte of Warre. London, 1591.

Guicciardini, Francesco. Storia d'Italia. Florence, 1561.

William Louis of Nassau to Maurice of Nassau, 8 December 1594. Koninklijk Huisarchief, The Hague, Ms. A22-1XE-79.

Literature

Andrade, Tonio. The Gunpowder Age: China, Military Innovation, and the Rise of the West in World History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016.

"Bayonet." In Encyclopædia Britannica, 11th ed., vol. 3. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1910.

Black, Jeremy. European Warfare, 1494–1660. London: Routledge, 2002.

Clodfelter, Micheal. Warfare and Armed Conflicts: A Statistical Encyclopedia of Casualty and Other Figures, 1492–2015. 4th ed. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2017.

Dodge, Theodore Ayrault. Gustavus Adolphus. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1895.

Notario López, Ignacio, and Iván Notario López. The Spanish Tercios 1536–1704. Oxford: Osprey, 2012.

Oman, Charles. A History of the Art of War in the Sixteenth Century. London: Methuen, 1937.

Parker, Geoffrey. "The Limits to Revolutions in Military Affairs: Maurice of Nassau, the Battle of Nieuwpoort (1600), and the Legacy." Journal of Military History 71, no. 2 (2007): 331–72.

Parker, Geoffrey. "The 'Military Revolution,' 1560–1660 – a Myth?" Journal of Modern History 48, no. 2 (1976): 195–214.

Parker, Geoffrey. The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500–1800. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Parrott, David. "Strategy and Tactics in the Thirty Years' War: The 'Military Revolution'." Militärgeschichtliche Mitteilungen 38 (1985): 7–25.

Roberts, Michael. "The Military Revolution, 1560–1660." In The Military Revolution Debate: Readings on the Military Transformation of Early Modern Europe, edited by Clifford J. Rogers, 13–35. Boulder: Westview Press, 1995. First published Belfast, 1956.

Rogers, Clifford J. "Tactics and the Face of Battle." In European Warfare, 1350–1750, edited by Frank Tallett and D. J. B. Trim, 203–35. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

Rodríguez Hernández, Antonio José. "The Spanish Imperial Wars of the Sixteenth Century." In War in the Iberian Peninsula, 700–1600, edited by Francisco García Fitz and João Gouveia Monteiro. London: Routledge, 2018.

Van Nimwegen, Olaf. The Dutch Army and the Military Revolutions, 1588–1688. Woodbridge: Boydell, 2010.

Online

"Pike & Shot Tactics." BCW Project. https://bcw-project.org.uk/military/tactics.

Queloz, Dimitry. "Grandson, Schlacht von." Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz (HLS), version of 17 July 2007. https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/008883/2007-07-17/.

Wiener, James Blake. "The Battle of Grandson." Swiss National Museum blog, June 2020. https://blog.nationalmuseum.ch/en/2020/06/the-battle-of-grandson/.

Notes

1. Dimitry Queloz, "Grandson, Schlacht von," in Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz (HLS), version of 17 July 2007, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/008883/2007-07-17/. ↩

2. James Blake Wiener, "The Battle of Grandson," Swiss National Museum blog, June 2020, https://blog.nationalmuseum.ch/en/2020/06/the-battle-of-grandson/ (first published in Medieval Warfare IX-6): the 412 executed, "the 400 pieces of artillery," and the riot over a booty that included "sumptuous clothes and jewellery." ↩

3. Theodore Ayrault Dodge, Gustavus Adolphus (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1895), 35, on "eighteen-foot pikes." ↩

4. William Garrard, The Arte of Warre (London, 1591), 229. ↩

5. Humphrey Barwick thought six days' training enough for pikemen and halberdiers: Humphrey Barwick, A Breefe Discourse, Concerning the Force and Effect of All Manuall Weapons of Fire (London, c. 1592). ↩

6. Charles Oman, A History of the Art of War in the Sixteenth Century (London: Methuen, 1937), 178–82: the sunken road and rampart, the Spanish arquebusiers under Pescara (Fernando d'Ávalos), Frundsberg's Landsknechts, and Swiss losses of "over 3000 dead." Oman, 184, says the Imperialists "had very few casualties indeed"; the figure of about 200 is from Micheal Clodfelter, Warfare and Armed Conflicts: A Statistical Encyclopedia of Casualty and Other Figures, 1492–2015, 4th ed. (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2017), 11. ↩

7. Oman, Art of War in the Sixteenth Century, 181, following Paolo Giovio, has the Swiss "received by four successive volleys." Tonio Andrade, The Gunpowder Age: China, Military Innovation, and the Rise of the West in World History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 148, finds no clear evidence of volley fire at Bicocca. ↩

8. Oman, Art of War in the Sixteenth Century, 180: when Montmorency halted the Swiss to bring up the guns, "he met with frank disobedience." ↩

9. Francesco Guicciardini, Storia d'Italia, bk. 14, quoted in Oman, Art of War in the Sixteenth Century, 184. ↩

10. Antonio José Rodríguez Hernández, "The Spanish Imperial Wars of the Sixteenth Century," in War in the Iberian Peninsula, 700–1600, ed. Francisco García Fitz and João Gouveia Monteiro (London: Routledge, 2018), 293. ↩

11. Robert Barret, The Theorike and Practike of Moderne Warres (London, 1598), bk. 3, 69. On his service "amongst forraine nations, as the French, the Dutch, the Italian, and Spaniard," see the dedication. ↩

12. Oman, Art of War in the Sixteenth Century, 59–60, on the three original tercios of Lombardy, Naples and Sicily, "as approved by Charles V in 1534." ↩

13. Clifford J. Rogers, "Tactics and the Face of Battle," in Frank Tallett and D. J. B. Trim (eds.), European Warfare, 1350–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 216–17: the share of shot "generally climbed in most nations over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries," and pike and shot "existed in a kind of tactical symbiosis." See also Jeremy Black, European Warfare, 1494–1660 (London: Routledge, 2002), 39–40. ↩

14. Geoffrey Parker, "The Limits to Revolutions in Military Affairs: Maurice of Nassau, the Battle of Nieuwpoort (1600), and the Legacy," Journal of Military History 71, no. 2 (2007): 331–72; Olaf van Nimwegen, The Dutch Army and the Military Revolutions, 1588–1688 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2010); "Pike & Shot Tactics," BCW Project, https://bcw-project.org.uk/military/tactics. ↩

15. William Louis of Nassau to Maurice of Nassau, 8 December 1594, Koninklijk Huisarchief, The Hague, Ms. A22-1XE-79; translated in Andrade, The Gunpowder Age, 145. ↩

16. Dodge, Gustavus Adolphus, 255–57, on the light musket, the "regimental pieces," and firing three deep with the first rank kneeling; "Pike & Shot Tactics," BCW Project, on the six-rank formation and the salvo. ↩

17. Dodge, Gustavus Adolphus, 265–69. Dodge has the Saxons driven from the field "in a short half hour." ↩

18. David Parrott, "Strategy and Tactics in the Thirty Years' War: The 'Military Revolution'," Militärgeschichtliche Mitteilungen 38 (1985): 7–25; Parker, Military Revolution. ↩

19. Florence's militia ordinance of 1506 armed "one-tenth only with firearms": Oman, Art of War in the Sixteenth Century, 96–97. A Swedish company of 150 had 75 musketeers and 59 pikemen: Dodge, Gustavus Adolphus, 35. ↩

20. Ignacio Notario López and Iván Notario López, The Spanish Tercios 1536–1704 (Oxford: Osprey, 2012). ↩

21. "Bayonet," in Encyclopædia Britannica, 11th ed., vol. 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1910), 557: after Killiecrankie, Mackay "introduced a ring-bayonet of his own invention"; the younger Puységur had already seen a ring bayonet in 1678. ↩

22. Michael Roberts, "The Military Revolution, 1560–1660," in The Military Revolution Debate: Readings on the Military Transformation of Early Modern Europe, ed. Clifford J. Rogers (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995), 13–35. ↩

23. Geoffrey Parker, "The 'Military Revolution,' 1560–1660 – a Myth?," Journal of Modern History 48, no. 2 (1976): 195–214. ↩