Today I wrapped up my half of a team-taught third-year course on Early Modern War, 1350-1850. Next week’s our reading week after which my co-instructor, Dave Leeson, takes up where I left off, circa. 1650. We opened the course with a book-end examination of Greece at the start and the end of our periods – I talked about Greece in the Venetian-Turkish Wars and then we jumped forward to the cause of Greek Independence in the early nineteenth century. I tried to frame each class meeting on different historiographic debates or thematic elements and then illustrate those with interesting examples and compelling readings. We wrapped up each class with discussions on the day’s assigned readings: pulling out arguments and assessing our responses to the same. To give you a taste of what the course has been like, I’m sharing parts of our syllabus below:
Course Objectives: Students 
will identify the key technological, cultural, tactical, and strategic developments that have shaped pre-modern warfare; demonstrate awareness of the role of political, economic, and social changes that have shaped war in the world through their research, analysis and assessment of key aspects of the history of early modern war and warfare.
My class topics for the first half of term:
January 8; The Military Revolution Debate
Readings: Michael Roberts, “The Military Revolution, 1560-1660” (Rogers); Geoffrey Parker, “In Defense of the Military Revolution” (Rogers)
January 12; The Rules of War & Chivalric Culture
Readings: Anne Curry, “Disciplinary Ordinances for English and Franco-Scottish Armies in 1385: An international code?” (Reader)
January 15; War as Set-Piece: Crécy, Poitiers & Agincourt
Readings: Clifford J. Rogers, “The Military Revolutions of the Hundred Years War” (Rogers)
January 19; Siege Warfare & the Early Modern Arms Race
Readings: Thomas F. Arnold, “Fortifications and the Military Revolution: The Gonzaga Experience, 1530-1630” (Rogers)
January 22; The Military Revolution at Sea
Readings: Louis Sicking, “Naval warfare in Europe, c. 1330- c. 1680” (Reader)
January 26; War from Below: Revolts & Riots
Readings: Anthony Fletcher & Diarmaid MacCulloch, “Kett’s Rebellion” (Reader)
January 29; Citizen and Soldier: Early Modern Military Cultures
Readings: Angela McShane, “Recruiting Citizens for Soldiers in Seventeenth-Century English Ballads” (Reader)
February 2; Supply and Demand: The Business of War
Readings: I.A.A. Thompson “’Money, Money, and Yet More Money!’ Finance, the Fiscal-State, and the Military Revolution: Spain, 1500-1650” (Rogers)
February 5; New Models of Armies: Military Command and Discipline
Readings: David A. Parrott, “Strategy and Tactics in the Thirty Years’ War: The ‘Military Revolution’” (Rogers)
February 9; Commercial and Colonial Wars, 1492-1650
Readings: John F. Guilmartin, Jr. “The Military Revolution: Origins and First Tests Abroad” (Rogers)
February 12; An Age of Atrocity?
Readings: Will Coster, “Massacre and Codes of Conduct in the English Civil War” (Reader)
Texts: Clifford J. Rogers, ed., The Military Revolution Debate: Readings on the Military Transformation of Early Modern Europe (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995) plus additional materials available via D2L and/or on reserve (“Reader”)
Assignments:
Essay Proposal One: 10% (Due January 26, a brief proposal of the topic for Essay One that includes a bibliography.)
Essay One: 25% (Due February 23, an 8-10 page research essay dealing with a topic in the history of war from 1350 through 1650.)
Essay Proposal Two: 10% (Due March 12, a brief proposal of the topic for Essay Two that includes a bibliography.)
Essay Two: 25% (Due April 2, an 8-10 page research essay dealing with a topic in the history of war from 1650 through 1850.)
Final Examination: 30% (All essay cumulative exam scheduled at the end of term.)
jliedl.ca 
As a military historian I would say that that seems like fine work for six weeks. The only thing I would say is that it is more Eurocentric than the title suggests. Before the eighteenth century there were many important military developments and effective armies outside of Catholic and Protestant Europe, and European armies in the eighteenth century continued to borrow from First Nations, Balkan, and South Asian traditions.
That’s a good point, Sean. I should say that the course is in our European history stream so there’s only a bit of an opportunity to integrate non-Western material. I interpret European broadly enough that we have a lot of opportunity for Turkish military history and several of the units dealt with colonial warfare. Next time we offer the course I plan to do more on Indian and Filipino militaries, as well as beef up what I had on the Chinese and Incan aspects.
That sounds good. I know that in a one-term course you can only cover so much, and the military revolution debate focuses on western Europe and gives a good organizing principle. I appreciate scholars such as David Nicolle, Rhoads Murphy, and Gabor Agoston who have made the military history of less canonical regions available in English.