being long and the recoil very severe, men suffered not a little from bruises and contusions with this weapon; but its efficiency was proved. Strozzi also introduced another Spanish improvement, namely the practice of making all his arquebuses of one bore, which, though it now sounds obvious enough, waited for some years to find general acceptance in Europe. Hence the weapons were known as arquebuses of calibre, which phrase in England was soon shortened simply to calivers. These however were arms of small bore:[75] it was, as usual, the Spaniards who were the first to arm their infantry with muskets[76] of large calibre. Alva was the man who introduced them, and the rebels of the Low Countries the first who felt their power. It needed but the substitution of a flint-lock for a match, and the abolition of the rest, to turn this weapon into Brown Bess, never so famous in English hands as in the battlefields of Alva's home. Bandoliers and cartridges had long been known to the Spaniards, and even to the French[77] before the middle of the sixteenth century, so that the general progress in arms and equipment was rapid. But the weapons had hardly been improved for infantry before cavalry also began to crave for them. The simplest method of course was to place pike and arquebus in the hands of mounted men and turn them into mounted infantry, which was duly done in the French army by Piero Strozzi in 1543, and has earned him the title of the father of dragoons.[78] But still earlier in the century there had grown up in Germany a new kind of cavalry, called by the simple name of Reiters, which had perfected the smaller fire-arms, the petronel[79] and the pistol, and had finally adopted the latter for its principal weapon. The result was an important revolution in the whole tactics of cavalry. [Sidenote: 1554.] Mention has already been made of the abandonment, at the close of the fifteenth century, of the dense column of mounted men-at-arms in favour of the less cumbrous formation in line, or as it was called _en haye_. The lance being still the principal arm of the cavalry, the freedom of movement gained by the change brought the attack of horse much nearer to the shock-action which is the rule at the present day. The new formation had, however, its disadvantages, for in the imperfect state of military discipline there was no certainty that the whole line would charge home. Retirement was so easy that cowards would drop back, feigning to bleed at the nose, to have lost a stirrup or cast a shoe,[80] while men of spirit, and this was especially true of the impetuous French, would race to be the first into the enemy's squadron, and from premature increase of speed would arrive at the shock in loose order, and with horses blown and exhausted. So well was this defect realised that a shrewd French officer, Gaspard de Tavannes, at the battle of Renty deliberately reverted to the old dense column and overthrew every line that he met.