LOSTELNEAU, Colbert de.

Le mareschal de bataille. Contenant le maniment des armes. Les evolutions. Plusieurs bataillons, tant contre l'infanterie que contre la cavalerie. Divers ordres de batailles. Avec un bref discours sur les considerations que doit avoix un souverain, avant que le commencer de guerre. Et un abregé des functions de generaux d'armées, de mareschaux de camp, & autres principales charges d'icelles.

Paris, Estienne Migon, 1647. Folio (375 x 260 mm), pp. [xii], 459, [1, blank], with numerous engravings of pikemen and musketeers, and with over 400 typographic illustrations printed in red, black and yellow; title in red and black, slightly dust-soiled, with the old stamps of the Militair Akademie and the Bibliothek des K. S. Artillerie-Corps; contemporary vellum; soiled. First edition. A military treatise written by a French marshal during the Thirty Years’ War advising infantry officers on the training and organisation of their troops. Lostelneau begins with step-by-step instructions, accompanied by engravings, demonstrating the use of the infantry’s two main weapons of the period, the musket and the pike, and follows with recommended drill manouvres, batallion formations and battle orders, which he illustrates with colour-printed diagrams. He concludes with an essay counselling the king, and military leaders in general, on how best to be prepared for war.The Mareschal de bataille was issued a year before the conclusion, with the Treaty of Westphalia, of the Thirty Years’ War, a period which had seen a dramatic growth in army size (in 1635 Richelieu and Louis XIII assembled an army totalling 150,000 or more, twice as large as any previous wartime military maintained by the French monarchy, see Lynn’s Giant of the grand siècle). ‘This expansion of the military establishment was primarily due to the growing importance of the infantry army, which was only twice as numerous as the cavalry in the army with which Charles VIII invaded Italy, but five times as great by the end of the seventeenth century’ (Guerlac, ‘Vauban’ in Paret, ed., Makers of modern strategy p. 65). Military leaders realised that obtaining ‘the greatest possible benefits from the tactical mix of musket and pike required a new degree of control, combined with a new style of combat leadership and more training. To achieve the highest degree of fire and mobility, infantry no longer could be deployed in large mass-formations, but instead was increasingly strung out in smaller units, requiring officers and men to display a greater degree of personal initiative and tactical skills, while at the same time conforming to an overall battle plan’ (Rothenberg, ‘Maurice of Nassau, Gustavus Adolphus, Raimondo Montecuccoli, and the “Military Revolution” of the seventeenth century’ in Paret, ed., Makers of modern strategy p. 34). To accomodate these changes in the nature of warfare, Lostelneau proposed ‘a battalion marshaled in eight ranks, eighty files across, composed half of pikes and half of musketeers. The maximum battalion size that Lostelneau would accept was 1,000’ (Lynn, Giant of the grand siècle p. 477).Brunet III 1178; Hiler p. 553; Katalog der Lipperheideschen Kostümbibliothek II Qb 43; Waddleton p. 1 (incorrectly dated ‘1657’).

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