This book was long in gestation and marks a complete change in focus from my previous work on the nobility of Bayeux. From the beginning I had three primary goals. The first was to write a social history of warfare during the French civil wars that made comprehensible what always seemed from existing accounts a hopelessly confused mess, a kind of latter-day Lebanon. A second goal was to write on the military affairs and institutions of the time in a way that was accessible not only to the interested early modernist or specialist military historian but to all students of European and French history, and to the general reader as well. This goal carried the special obligation of making understandable a way of warfare which in its technical, social, and cultural aspects is decidedly foreign today, though to those familiar with American military operations in the Vietnam war much of the royal army's wearying and ultimately unsuccessful pursuit of the Huguenot “main force” will have a familiar ring. My third goal was never to lose sight of the human dimensions of the wars.

The reader will of course be the final judge of my success in fulfilling these goals, but even to attempt to implement them required the assistance and encouragement of many people and institutions.