The Tercio

What is the tericco?

The tercio was a Spanish infantry formation that was highly effective during the Early Modern era of “pike and shot,” and a big part of the reason why the Spanish were so dominant in European warfare in this period.

In essence, the tercio was a tightly-packed, well-drilled square formation of mixed pikemen, musketeers, and swordsmen, designed to be extremely durable and very hard to be broken by cavalry. The pikemen would protect the musketeers from cavalry, and the musketeers would in turn direct their firepower at opposing pike, while the swordsmen would be used to attack weakened formations or to fill any gaps in the line. On the battlefield, the Spanish would field multiple tercios in a kind of checkerboard fashion that allowed the tercios to support one another with enfilade fire against enemy units, making them incredibly daunting to assault in hand-to-hand combat.

(credit to Milgesch)

But more than just a clever formation and use of mixed arms, the Spanish tercio was dominant because Spanish soldiers were experienced professionals with incredible discipline, executing the complex drill of the tercio (where lines of pike and musketeers had to move past one another repeatedly) in the most difficult of circumstances, and keeping their lines together even after absorbing hideous amounts of casualties, which often allowed them to exhaust their opponents.

Gradually, the tercio became obsolete as other strategies evolved to deal with the dominant Spanish. Because of how close-packed and thus slow-moving the tercios were, they were incredibly vulnerable to massed firepower, both from infantry and artillery. For example, Maurice, Prince of Orange moved his armies into longer, thinner lines that could bring more guns to bear on the enemy than square blocks where the sides and rear couldn’t always fire, and found success at the Battle of Nieuwpoort. Likewise, the Duc d’Enghien at the Battle of Rocroi used a combination of superior cavalry to encircle the tercio and massed artillery to blast them to pieces.

You mention that feudal rents were nominal so didnt account for inflation, what difference would it make if they did adjust according to inflation/how could that be done?

Given that the Price Revolution played a major role in the relative decline of the nobility’s economic and thus military and political power, allowing for the rise of both the bourgeoisie and the monarchical nation-state…it would change a lot.

Not that things wouldn’t happen – the commercial and industrial revolutions are still going to happen, and the early modern military revolution is still going to happen, regardless of the position of the nobility – but it’s more that the nobility would be better positioned to fight the political ramifications of these changes. Whether they would succeed and make all of Europe look like a rationalized Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, or fail and the only difference is that it takes a lot more violence for those political revolutions to succeed, I don’t know.

One of the major changes that would happen is that the peasantry of Europe would be much, much worse off, because one of the few routes to upward mobility they had was making more money off of the increase in food prices relative to their rent. So maybe you’d see a lot more peasant rebellions than in OTL?

Simon Rumble Asks: Nobility – – > Officer class

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).

Westros’s armies make up about 1% of its population, right? Is that a function of its feudal society (and a different, more centralized society would have a higher number), or the expense of raising an army, regardless of time period (and so even if Westeros moved to a centralized absolute monarchy, the number of troops would not rise)?

It’s a rough estimate of the size of armies that premodern societies could keep under arms. Even Ancient Rome at its height of wealth and administrative organization couldn’t keep more than 1% of its population.

The basic problem is that in premodern economies, the limited productivity of agriculture means that there’s a limited surplus you can use to feed non-farmers and that there’s real tradeoffs between your army and your agricultural labor force.

Add onto that serious problems with logistics and organization – you need systems in place to buy enough food to feed the army, transport it from farm to (army) table, store it so that it doesn’t go bad, and then distribute it. And that’s just to feed the army – you need to do the same thing for arms, armor, equipment, clothing, and pay (especially if you don’t want the army to desert or mutiny).

That’s a heavy lift for any state. Rome was exceptionally good at administration, but even it was quite a strain on the system – you can especially see the problems they ran into with paying the army vs. keeping the coinage at a decent value, hence why the Roman state eventually shifted to systems of requisition and payments in kind, which eventually lead to quasi-feudal systems which would eventually give rise to the feudal army. And so army sizes dropped – ancient Rome had 700,000 men under arms across the whole of the Empire, but medieval states were lucky if they could get their army up into the tens of thousands.

However, around the 16th and 17th centuries in Europe, you had something that historians call the military revolution, or sometimes the early modern military revolution, where suddenly armies increase in size into the hundreds of thousands. And then by the time of the French Revolution, for the first time you’ve got nations with more than a million men under arms. Part of this had to do with changing productivity – there were persistent improvements in agricultural productivity (the so-called agricultural revolution), there were improvements in transportation which meant that you could transport goods faster over longer distances while losing less of your goods to spoilage and wastage, and there were major improvements in bureaucratic administration, which allowed armies to organize their supply systems effectively.

So no, it’s not a natural limit.