3 - Textbook War: The Genealogy of Kriegsbücher

Summary

Thus I have decided that such a book should not be doctored or plastered with uppity words, but rather with experience, and kept with or near those in the field, rather than sit behind the oven and next to the wine.

—Leonhard Fronsperger, Kriegsbuch

Gunpowder emerged as an essential material for European warfare in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and literary and philosophical discussions of gunpowder simultaneously matured and proliferated. A crucial tactical tool, gunpowder technology also became a dominant theme in the growing literature of military theory in the sixteenth century. Several sixteenth-century German military theorists even claimed that no war could possibly be won without gunpowder weapons. A paradoxical justification of warfare permeates these military texts, however. In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century German literary texts about war, including novels, poems, morality plays, and even broadsheets, gunpowder becomes a symbolic vehicle, usually expressing negative sentiments about warfare in general. However, in German works of military theory, especially in the German Kriegsbucher, gunpowder was usually presented as a tool of war. Tools of war, by the logic of these texts, are used for the maintenance of peace. Not all early modern military theorists, however, were convinced that gunpowder technology was a good thing even if it was necessary. Some military theorists, even as they were explaining how to use it, represented gunpowder as the unavoidable primer of a catastrophe that brought betrayal, immorality, dishonor, and cowardice to military culture. The following chapters consider the tension between these two perspectives on gunpowder weapons, not as antithetical to each other, but rather as a product of evolving discussions of peace and moral responsibility indigenous to the age of confessional reformations and as the result of shifting forms of military tactics and training.

Under consideration in this chapter is, in particular, a genre of military scientific literature that had a nearly 400-year international tradition. As it appears in German-speaking lands, we will call this work the Kriegsbuch (book of war) and we will consider generic distinctions between it and the Kriegstraktat (war treatise). Recognizing the difference between these two genres is important to our understanding of the value of Kriegsbucher as cultural artifacts.