Smilin' Dave wrote:So, in the age of shot and pike, where pike-armed infantry generally fought other pike armed infantry while other arms (the afore mentioned shot, artillery and the cavalry) did their bit. References are made to the 'push of pike'... but I don't get it, and I'm hoping someone can explain this for me.
Cavalry, we are told, won't charge home against a pike armed formation because the horse won't happily throw itself into a wall of spikes. Why do the infantry do this then? I suppose the guys at the back of the formation just push everyone else in. But doesn't that mean that the two formations become deadlocked on contact, a sort of sandwich filled with those who died going into contact and those now too compressed to do anything useful? Pikemen were generally not well armoured so I would have thought casualties would be high. While I suppose it would be hard to actually hit someone specifically with a pike, I would have thought a 'wall' of them would be bound to hit someone in the other 'wall'.
I can follow the idea of 'push' in ancient warfare between phalanxes, since combatants (as I understand it) were generally equipped with a shield and were probably more likely to be wearing armour. So in effect they are better equipped to close in and have an ideal tool for pushing the other side. The pikeman does not have these things.
So how does the 'push of pike' actually work? Or have I just misunderstood the warfare of this particular period?
I only just found this thread.
OK, there is a difference between pike and shot era pike tactics and ancient Macedonian pike tactics. The Swiss during the Italian wars era were more like the Macedonians.
To understand the role of pikes in the ECW we need to look at the evolution of the firearm from the Italian wars period. At the start of the Italian wars the French had the state of the art in land armies. They used Gendarme heavy knights, Swiss pikemen and artillery. The Spanish troops couldn't stand against this power in the open so they developed what we would call asymmetric forces to defeat the French. Thus the Spanish created the Tercio, a 16th century combined arms formation, mixing pikes with crossbows and gun powder weapons. The pikes formed up into a deep block with the missile troops at each corner, retreating into the block when threatened.
Though slow, this formation could defend again the Gendarmes and was able to stand up to the Swiss pikes. The French artillery could have potentially dealt with the tercio but historically the French had trouble getting their artillery in to play during battles due to the clumsy nature of 16th artillery. (it wasn't until well into the 18th century than artillery really became mobile on the battlefield).
The Spanish most often used field fortifications, good defensive terrain and gun powder weapons with the tercios or landsknecht waiting in support to reinforced the arquebusiers and swivel gunners when the Swiss got too close.
It was during the French wars of Religion, a generation or so later, that the Tercio idea was further developed by the Dutch. The idea was to deploy into a more linear formation that could concentrate the missile power of the gun powder weapons. This formation retained some pikes for defense against cavalry and is the prototype of the pike an shot infantry regiment. At this early time, the ratio of pikes to shot was low, with a greater proportion going to the shot as time went on. There was not much drill in the formation at this time. Later innovators introduced reloading drills, then drills to change the ranks as each fired in turn. the weapons became standardized, better arming mechanisms developed, and prepacked cartridges were introduced. Finally, the bayonet became common toward the end of the 17th century and the pike fell out of use during the time of the Great Northern War and the War of the Spanish Succession.
The innovations such as reloading drill, standardization and prepacked ammo, and flintlocks, meant faster reloading and thus a higher rate of fire. Formations became thinner and better drilled at maneuvering over the course of the 18th century. A Napoleonic infantry regiment was much nastier than an ECW regiment in all sorts of ways. They could fire faster, all men had bayonets, and they could march around and preform various maneuvers undreamt off by ECW period infantry. They were still vulnerable to cavalry if caught off guard or in disorder.
In conclusion, the pike and shot era pike played a role in protecting slow firing musketeers from assault, particularly from cavalry. It was part of the evolution of fire armed infantry and disappeared as the new gun powdered infantry development started to reach its potential. But it wasn't the same concept as the Swiss pikes or Macedonian pikes. The later was shock infantry deployed with the intention of closing with and destroying the enemy, rather than protect missile troops.