a miserable condition that he was never really properly informed of the actual effective strength of his army, for his captains, whose interest it was to exaggerate the number of the rank and file under their standards (Figs. 52 and 53), habitually deceived the generals and their superiors. To such a degree was this carried that, on the eve of the battle of Pavia, Francis I. was led to believe that his army was a third stronger than it really was. At last, however, in 1517, there issued from this chaotic confusion the first germ of a proper system of supervision and control of all matters relating to war. [Illustration: Fig. 52.--Knight in complete Armour. Fig. 53.--Arquebusier of the Sixteenth Century. After Cesare Vecellio, “Degli Habiti Antichi e Moderni:” 8vo, 1590.] If the tacticians of Italy were the first to fathom theoretically the science of war, it was the Swiss, under Marshal Trivulce, the Spaniards, under Gonzalvez of Cordova, and finally the Flemish, under the Duke of Alba, who successfully restored the military combinations of ancient Greece. They were the first to manœuvre in dense masses and in battalions, and they were the first to successfully employ the column formation of troops. The pikemen of France followed their example, while the troops armed with projectile weapons fought as skirmishers in the van, or in lines two or three deep. It was not, however, till Henry IV.’s time that any considerable body of troops was seen capable of advancing in close column without breaking its formation, and it was not till Louis XIII.’s time that the regiment, first introduced in the preceding reign, became a recognised permanent military unit. [Illustration: Fig. 54.--The Reapers of Death, an Allegory of War, from an Engraving of Hans-Sebald Beham (Sixteenth Century).--Collection of M. Ambroise Firmin-Didot.] [Illustration: Fig. 55.--Battle of Dreux, December 19, 1562, won by François de Guise over the Protestants. In the foreground is Marshal Saint-André being shot by a soldier.--Fac-simile of an Engraving of the period by Tortorel and Périssin (Collection of M. Guénebaut).] Towards the close of the fifteenth century the French native cavalry still consisted entirely of heavy troopers. The Albanians, the mercenaries of whom the French light cavalry were composed, sold their services, _man and horse_, as the Swiss sold theirs, _man and halbert_. Charles VIII. enrolled eight thousand Albanians for his Italian expedition; but, fifty years later, this foreign element had disappeared from the French army, which had by that time, in addition to its heavy cavalry, a body of light cavalry of its own (Fig. 55).