consisted mainly of members of the middle class with the education and experience needed to run the government. Since kings were usually desperate for money, they resorted to selling government offices, a practice known as venality of office. This system had its good and bad points. The main good points were that it provided the king with some much needed cash and officials who showed more efficiency and loyalty to their king than the old feudal nobility had.
The main drawback was that such a system bred corruption, since money, not ability, was often the key to gaining office. Bureaucrats tended to assume their own consciousness as a class, maintaining a common silence to thwart any attempts to weed out corruption. They could often successfully resist or slow down reforms or other policies they did not like. But, for all the problems the new bureaucracy created, it was still more efficient than the old feudal system and gave kings a far greater degree of control over their states.
The new warfare
Renaissance armies told a similar story, being somewhat unruly but still better than their feudal predecessors. The ranks were now filled with mercenaries who fought until the king's money ran out. This gave the king much longer campaigning seasons than the forty days that feudal vassals typically owed. But it could still present some serious, and, at times, embarrassing problems. As soon as the king ran out of money, such armies would often desert or refuse to fight any longer. Also, since they were not usually natives of the state they were fighting for, they often had no qualms about plundering the people they were supposedly defending. Despite these drawbacks, Renaissance armies gave kings in Western Europe much tighter control over their states, largely because they were so expensive that no one but kings could afford to maintain them.
Part of that expense lay in the new type of warfare emerging by 1500. Although heavily armored knights were still prominent, their role was being reduced by two new ways of fighting, one medieval and one modern. One was massed formations of pikemen, reminiscent of the old Greek and Macedonian phalanxes, who formed the core of the Renaissance army. Until the early 1500's, the Swiss were reputedly Europe's best pikemen, and every prince wanted Swiss mercenaries in his army, no matter what the cost. In the 1500's, German pikemen, known as landsknechte, and Spanish pikemen would rival the Swiss in their reputations for ferocity on the battlefield.
The other new and expensive element emerging in the new warfare was gunpowder. Hanging on the flanks of each pike square were men wielding primitive muskets. Such guns were heavy, hard to load, and even harder to aim accurately. They also presented the danger of blowing up in their users' faces. Still, they could be very deadly when fired in massed volleys, having a range of up to 100 meters. Gradual but constant improvements, such as the matchlock that freed both hands for aiming, made them increasingly effective throughout the 1400's and 1500's. As a result, the number of musketeers, and their cost, gradually climbed throughout this period. The combination of guns' firepower with the solid pike formations proved to be the most potent military innovation of the Renaissance. It ruled Europe's battlefields until the later 1600's when better muskets and the bayonet phased out the pikeman for good.