Social Change and Military Revolution in Early Modern Europe: Some Danish Evidence

Abstract

There is general agreement among scholars of military history on the main features of military developments during the transition from the middle ages to the early modern period. A brief sketch of the broad outlines of these developments may therefore suffice as a preface to an investigation of Danish knight service in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.The decisive factor in the medieval army was the fully armoured, lancebearing mounted knight. The battlefield was totally dominated by the combat technique of these bands of qualifizierten Einzelkämpfern, offensive combat at close quarters. The remaining forces, in contrast, functioned merely as auxiliaries to the main arm - the heavy mounted knights.

How Denmark Became Democratic

“…Most explanations and analyses of the transformation from absolutism to democracy in Denmark are seen from the perspective of society. Rarely do we find a statist approach in which the interests of the state and the state elite are accounted for in the analysis, but there are a few instances (Jespersen, 1983(Jespersen, , 1987Østergård, 1992;Lind, 1994;. Most of these scholars tend to use the military dimension as one among many other variables, or they tend to claim that warfare and geopolitics are only relevant for understanding social change in certain limited cases.…”