All the systems of real weight and consideration have now been discussed. In the overthrow of the supremacy of feudal cavalry the tactics of the shock and the tactics of the missile had each played their part: which had been the more effective it would be hard to say. Between them however the task had been successfully accomplished. The military strength of that system which had embraced all Europe in its cramping fetters, had been shattered to atoms. Warlike efficiency was the attribute no longer of a class but of whole nations; and war had ceased to be an occupation in which feudal chivalry found its pleasure, and the rest of society its ruin. The ‘Art of War’ had become once more a living reality, a matter not of tradition but of experiment, and the vigorous sixteenth century was rapidly adding to it new forms and variations. The middle ages were at last over, and the stirring and scientific spirit of the modern world was working a transformation in military matters, which was to make the methods of mediæval war seem even further removed from the strategy of our own century, than are the operations of the ancients in the great days of Greece and Rome.
THE END.
[FOOTNOTES:]
[1] Cf. Vegetius and Maurice.
[2] Lord Mahon in his Life of Belisarius is wrong in asserting that the legion was no longer known in Justinian’s day. The term is mentioned, though rarely, in Procopius, who more frequently calls the legionary troops οἱ ἐκ τῶν καταλόγων {hoi ek tôn katalogôn}.
[3] Cf. Tacitus, Annals, ii. 21.
[4] The old legions of the first century are found in full vigour at the end of the third. The coins of the British usurper Carausius commemorate as serving under him several of the legions which, as early as the reign of Claudius, were already stationed in Britain and Gaul.
[5] He had 132 legions and ‘numeri,’ besides 100 unattached cohorts.
[6] See Gibbon, ii. cap. xvii.
[7] See Tacitus, Annals, ii. 14.