An 'invisible giant', the seventeenth-century French army was the largest and hungriest institution of the Bourbon monarchy. Combining social and cultural emphases with more traditional institutional and operational concerns, this book examines the army in depth, studying recruitment, composition, d[...]
Warfare dominated the long reign of the `Sun-king', Louis XIV. For forty years from 1672, France was continuously at war and had one of the largest armies seen in the West since the fall of imperial Rome. The campaigns secured little territory, but almost bankrupted the country and the consequences [...]