In this lively and engaging new biography, Harry Kelsey shatters the familiar image of Sir Francis Drake. The Drake of legend was a pious, brave, and just seaman who initiated the move to make England a great naval power and whose acts of piracy against his country's enemies earned him a knighthood for patriotism. Kelsey paints a different and far more interesting picture of Drake as an amoral privateer at least as interested in lining his pockets with Spanish booty as in forwarding the political goals of his country, a man who became a captain general of the English navy, but never waged traditional warfare with any success. Drawing on much new evidence, Kelsey describes Drake's early life as the son of a poor family in sixteenth-century England. He explains how Drake dabbled in piracy, gained modest success as a merchant, and then took advantage of the hostility between Spain and England to embark on a series of daring pirate raids on undefended Spanish ships and ports, preempting Spanish demands for punishment by sharing much of his booty with the Queen and her councillors. Elizabeth I liked Drake because he was a charming rogue, and she made him an integral part of her war plans against Spain and its armada, but she quickly learned not to trust him with an important command: he was unable to handle a large fleet, was suspicious almost to the point of paranoia, and had no understanding of personal loyalty. For Drake, the mark of success was to amass great wealth, preferably by taking it from someone else and the primary purpose of warfare was to afford him the opportunity to accomplish this.
(1999). The Peace of Westphalia of 1648 and the Origins of Sovereignty. The International History Review: Vol. 21, No. 3, pp. 569-591.
1he later stages of the Thirty Years War', one historian has written, 1 were not propitious to large-scale strategic designs... Campaigns became forays, [and] battles became encounters void of strategic significance.' These are not, as one might expect, the words of some recent revisionist historian attacking the concept of the 'Military Revolution', but of Michael Roberts, the very originator of that term. Even while praising Gustavus Adolphus for his innovations in all aspects of war, Roberts bemoans his 'territorial' strategy, sharply limited by logistical concerns, and laments that 'of Gustav Adolfs strategic innovations little or nothing was transmitted to his immediate posterity'.1 The 'revolution' in strategy under Gustavus, Roberts makes it clear, was both inadequate and temporary. Roberts's harsh view of early modern strategy, and of strategy in the latter half of the Thirty Years War in particular, is hardly unique. Already Clausewitz and Delbruick held similar views.2 More recently,
Preface - Maps - Introduction - The Origins of the Conflict - 1618: Bohemia and the Empire - 1629: Counter-Reformation and Habsburg Supremacy - 1635: An Abortive Peace - 1648: A New Order for Europe? - State Finance and the Structure of Warfare - Epilogue: Germany after 1648 - List of Abbreviations - Notes and References - Select Bibliography - Index
Weapons and Warfare in Renaissance Europe explores the history of gunpowder in Europe from the thirteenth century, when it was first imported from China, to the sixteenth century, as firearms became central to the conduct of war. Bridging the fields of military history and the history of technology -- and challenging past assumptions about Europe's "gunpowder revolution" -- Hall discovers a complex and fascinating story. Military inventors faced a host of challenges, he finds, from Europe's lack of naturally occurring saltpeter -- one of gunpowder's major components -- to the limitations of smooth-bore firearms. Manufacturing cheap, reliable gunpowder proved a difficult feat, as did making firearms that had reasonably predictable performance characteristics. Hall details the efforts of armorers across Europe as they experimented with a variety of gunpowder recipes and gunsmithing techniques, and he examines the integration of new weapons into the existing structure of European warfare.
