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The transition from medieval to early modern warfare centered on adoption of gunpowder weapons, which made medieval fortifications obsolete and required new military technologies, trained professionals, and larger standing armies funded by centralized states. The military revolution reinforced early modern state formation and imperial expansion by creating military advantages for well-resourced kingdoms and requiring massive financial resources that only centralized states could mobilize.
Medieval warfare revolved around castles, knights, and relatively small armies of professional soldiers and feudal levies. That system rested on a specific military logic: stone fortifications were nearly impervious to conventional assault, so control of territory meant control of castles, and knights — expensive armored cavalry — represented decisive offensive force. Gunpowder shattered this equilibrium. By the mid-15th century, artillery could batter medieval walls into rubble. The fall of Constantinople in 1453 to Ottoman cannon is the canonical example: walls that had held for a millennium were breached in weeks. Suddenly the entire infrastructure of medieval military power — stone towers, high curtain walls — was obsolete.
The response was the trace italienne, a new fortification design featuring low, angled earthwork bastions that absorbed cannonballs rather than shattering under them. Crucially, the trace italienne required far more construction labor, engineering expertise, and stone than medieval castles. Defending a frontier now meant building entire networks of these expensive fortifications. Simultaneously, firearms were changing how armies fought: pike-and-shot formations replaced cavalry as the decisive battlefield unit, and training large infantry armies required time, professional drill-masters, and sustained pay. The result was that armies grew dramatically in size and cost through the 16th and 17th centuries — a transition historians call the military revolution.
Here is where your prerequisite on early modern state formation becomes central. The new warfare demanded resources that feudal fragmentation could not supply. Only states capable of systematic taxation, bureaucratic administration, and access to credit markets could field competitive armies and maintain modern fortifications. This created a powerful feedback loop: military competition between states drove the development of centralized fiscal-administrative machinery, and states with better fiscal machinery won wars and survived, while those without either built state capacity or were absorbed. War was not merely an output of state power — it was an engine of state formation.
The imperial dimension is equally important. European states with gunpowder armies and oceangoing ships gained decisive advantages over non-European polities that lacked artillery and trace italienne fortifications. Portuguese forts along African and Asian coastlines, Spanish conquest of Mesoamerican and Andean empires, and later Dutch and English trading post networks were all built on this military asymmetry. The military revolution thus connects directly to the question of why European colonial expansion succeeded at the scale it did in the early modern period — not because of any cultural superiority, but because specific military technologies created temporary asymmetries that European states exploited systematically.
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