18th-Century Characters, Including Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 37

[cahn]

More diaries of our favorite 18th-century Prussian diary-keeper have been unearthed and have been synopsized!

January 18th: Blessed be thou to me! Under your light, my Prince Heinrich was born!

Comments

Re: Peter Hagendorf: Diary of a Mercenary from the 30-Years-War - I

[luzula]

Okay, actually I found some support for this now:

...the early modern period seems to represent something of a peak in the uncontrolled destructiveness of armies, a combination of the burgeoning size of field forces as compared to the Middle Ages with state finance and logistics systems unprepared to cope with the new larger armies. Medieval armies may not have been any nicer, but they were smaller which reduced their impact, while the armies of the 1700s and 1800s were increasingly better organized and supplied and as a result less logistically destructive.

and

Repeated ‘contributions’ and foraging over the course of the Eighty Years War (1568-1648) in the Low Countries and the Thirty Years War (1618-1648) in the Holy Roman Empire both created depopulated ‘no man’s land’ areas which in turn made further military operations logistically challenging as no army can forage a depopulated countryside; devastation on this scale and over this much area seemed to have been mostly out of reach for the smaller armies of the Middle Ages. In the late 1600s, we see a marked shift towards a greater degree of central state supply and control which begins to reduce the uncontrolled destructiveness of armies (even as the intentional capacity for destruction of armies is rising), though foraging is still a major factor in warfare well into the 1800s.

Quotes from military historian Brett Deveraux.

And the destructiveness of Cumberland in the Highlands had nothing to do with needing to get food/plunder, that was intentional as a political tool.

Hmm, I wonder whether the attitude towards rape of women by soldiers changed as well? I suppose I will just have to actually read that book about women and warfare in the early modern period to find out...I'm waiting for it to come in at the library.