The Art of Renaissance Warfare is a light, popular gloss of the title. It's an odd choice for Turnbull, who's written something like 70 books on the military history of pre-modern Japan, to switch continents and focus on Europe, and I think both the detail and analysis suffer.

Intrinsically, though, the 150 years discussed marked a major shift in how war was conducted, from feudal retinues centered around armored knights, to professional mercenary companies where linear formations of arquebusers and blocks of pikemen resisted cavalry more often than not. Meanwhile, siege artillery made millennia of vertical stone fortresses obsolete, and gunpowder went from a curiosity to the core of military power.

Turnbull tells engaging stories, ranging from Granada to Constantinople and Antwerp to Moscow, with lots of details of the supreme commander (oh, and great illustrations). But there's little sense of tactics, let alone strategy in this book, or what might make one soldier artful and another a clod.