Deploying foot battalia in the Thirty Years War

 At the point where I sat down to write this post I had two other posts part completed.  One about the various German and Imperial armies in the TYW and one about a particular battle.  Part way through the first drafts of these I realised that a key point in both was a need to understand how the Infantry formations of the period were drawn up.

As I'm interested in the various German and Imperial forces at the moment, lets start by looking at what we know about the major influence on Early Imperial and Catholic League infantry formations: the Spanish.  My main source here is Gerat Barry and his work 'A discourse on military discipline', published in 1634.  Barry goes into a lot (and I do mean a LOT) of detail on the use of square roots to determine how to draw up an infantry escuadron (aka a battalia).  Seeing that we can now work square roots out on a smart phone I will not bore you with the excruciating depth and detail of using the period square root tables.  If you are desperate to know there are facsimile copies of the work on a couple of free to use academic sites.  For our purposes lets just slim the process down.

Barry's basic formation starts with a square  of pikemen, by which I mean an equal number of ranks and files.  This is considered the core of the Escuadron  and it is a square so it can fight with equal ability to the front, rear or sides.  This body is then surrounded with musket or caliver armed men to an equal amount all around, for example it might be four files on each wing plus four ranks ahead and behind (of both the pike block and the shot wings.  He recommends that the depth of shot be no more than 5 ranks or files as that is the maximum number who can shelter under the pikes.  Barry uses square roots to determine how many ranks and files of shot are required to fully enclose the pike centre.  This formation is called a squadron square by Barry but it isn't one of the four tactical formations he states were most often used by Spanish Infantry (see this post for details Small but Perfectly Formed: 17th Century Armies - The Spanish part two  ). I'm assuming that it is the default starting formation that is adjusted to create the actual tactical formation desired.

Battle of the White Mountain 1619 by Snayers

You have seen this painting of the Battle of the White Mountain before, as it is used in the article I linked to above.  If you look at the infantry in the foreground they seem to be deployed in the formations Barry is describing as a Squadron Square, so perhaps it isn't a starting formation but one used in combat.

Barry then describes how to amend the basic squadron Square to create formations which are wider than their depth or alternatively deeper than their width.  Again this uses a set of tables (the man did like a complicated set of arithmetical tables) but we can ignore those and just accept that the Spanish could and did form bodies of various depths and widths and these were all encased in a ring of shot in Barry's time.  As an aside Barry also notes that excess soldiers who don't fit into the neat formations are to be used to guard the colours.  This suggests that officers and colour parties etc are additional to the men in his formulas and possibly they formed a rank in addition to those arrived at by his tables.

I have looked at two versions of Barry's work one is converted to a modern type face and lacks the images while the second is a scan of an original copy which includes them.  In neither version can I find  any evidence for the use of the four corner mangas of shot.  Plus he only touches on the four standard formations in passing.

Faced with all the tedious business of calculating all those square roots I can begin to see the appeal of a system with a fixed number of ranks as devised by the Dutch.  As these formations only had shot on the flanks of the pike block it was probably easier to devise tactics which focussed on fighting to the forward arc of the formations   This in turn means that you need a different way of defending in depth and this gives birth to brigade formations.  This may also go some way to explaining why Tilly drew up his large battalia in a single line rather than in a chequer board (but I digress, but I will return to that point later).  

One interesting formation is discussed this is the "Cross Battell".  Essentially the main body of the Escuadron's pike is divided into four bodies.  As shown below.  In the worked example given by Barry this consists of 512 pikemen and 904 musketeers.  The Pike being drawn up in blocks of eleven ranks and eleven files each, which gives 121 pike men in each of the four blocks.  The mathematically inclined amongst you will have worked out that 4 x 121 = 484 pikemen, which means 28 pikemen seem to be getting the day off!  I'm assuming they are being used to guard the colours somewhere within the formation.  Barry shows the four blocks in corner to corner contact as below, this gives problems when he discusses deploying the shot though.

Here is the text from Barry on dealing with the shot, complete with period spelling:

"Nowe for the divison of youre propounded number of shott.  Double the one flanke of eache one'of the 4 batteles of pikes, whiche double will by 88. this 88. = the double flanke of the 4. batteles of pikes divide by 904 youre propounded number of musketes, and the number in the quotient wilt by 10:.and 24. musketes remayninge, and say that the two flankes of eache of youre 4 batteles of pikes are to by lined withe 11; rankes of ten musketes in eache ranke as by the figure; deutiones folowenge yove may playnely ce, and withe the observation of this rule withe any other, number eyther greate or smale yove ſsall withe facility kno, we how to proportionably divide yovre shott for' to guarinsh the two flankes of yovre squadron of pikes."

I have highlighted the part which causes me to wonder how a cross battell was actually deployed.  Working through the above text it creates eight blocks of 110 shot deployed in blocks of 11 ranks by 10 files.  That leaves 24 musketeers joining the surplus pikemen guarding the colours .  Placing a block to each flank of the four pike blocks with the pike in corner to corner contact means we are trying to get two musket blocks into the central space, but there is only space for one of them, and Barry previously says that space is useful for holding baggage and injured men. So something has to give!

This seems to be what Barry means.  Red blocks are bodies of shot

The above is entirely my supposition so it could be complete spheroids!  It looks remarkably like a four squadron Swedish Brigade in layout but with smaller component parts as each pike and shot is only 220 shot and 121 pike.  Given that Barry was writing after Breitenfeld he may just be theorising on what the Swedes had done or he may be trying to claim the idea was a Spanish one, or perhaps it actually was their concept all along!

The one thing we can take from Barry (and the Snayers painting) is that Manga formations deployed on the corners of pike blocks were not a thing for the Spanish armies in the TYW. and formations were probably rectangular with shot all around the pike until at least 1633.  For me the Jury is definitely out on the existence of the cross battell. However, it does give a starting point on looking at the other combatants infantry deployments.

So lets move on a little.  The Catholic League forces under Tilly used what I have seen called a double battalion formation (Guthrie uses this term so spheroids may come into it again).  A double battalion had twice as many files as ranks which gave them more combat capability in the forward arc., so was wider than the basic Spanish Infantry formations.  

I have read that Guthrie (I can't afford to buy his works) states that Spanish Musket and by association Catholic League ones under Tilly didn't form in neat ranks and files but instead operated in a loose swarm around the formed pike centre.  This seems to be more spherical rubbish to me.  Barry goes on (and on, and on) about how to form shot in ranks and files and the duties of NCOs in keeping formations of shot in their proper ranks and files.  I'm comfortable in saying that Tilly was at least as obsessed with maintaining formations in good order as Barry was.  Tilly is also supposed to have said that the shot wings of an infantry should not exceed 20 files as more than that meant the outermost musketeers couldn't easily run for shelter under the pikes.

Steven's Balagan blog (William Guthrie on Tilly's Big Tercios - Steven's Balagan) has a useful comparison between Tilly's big battalia and the equivalent Imperial formation showing how he considers these two formations were drawn up at around the time of Breitenfeld in 1632.  I won't steal Steven's thunder by repeating all the detail of his analysis, I recommend following the link and reading it for yourselves.  In a nutshell Tilly deployed units that were double the size of the Imperial formations but as they were far deeper they had almost the same frontage as you can see from his illustrations below (Imperials at the top and Tilly's Catholic League at the bottom)

Here are Steven's rather nice images of how the two formations were deployed
Yellow area shows the pike block, red musketeers and the sand tone the arquebusiers

I'm still of the opinion that Tilly was slightly stuck in the past and after his death the Catholic German states moved to smaller battalia as had Wallenstein.  That doesn't mean he stuck with the Spanish formations detailed by Barry I think he did adapt but probably not fast enough.  But more about that when I discuss the Armies of Germany and the Hapsburg Holy Roman Empire in a future post.