Can you explain more about how the nobility became the officer class? I know it has something to do with the rise of artillery. Thanks!
Well, in a sense the nobility had always been the officer class, in the sense that premodern armies were largely made up of (and led by) the nobility.
But at the same time as the military revolution, when European armies got much bigger and thus needed professional officers to keep them organized and effective in the field, you also had economic transformations that hit the smaller nobility pretty badly.
Without the capital to get into the commercial revolution or the industrial revolution, and unable to engage in trade lest they lose their social standing, one of the major career paths open to these lesser nobles was the military. They had just enough money and education to get the training and equipment, they had enough social privilege to keep out ambitious bourgeois social climbers (or at least keep them to the lower ranks), and military service was considered honorable.
And of course, these petty noblemen were some of the most conservative forces in Europe, because their social privileges were really the only things keeping them above the peasantry, let alone the haut bourgeois (who tended to be far richer).
RFTIT Tumblr Backup 