220 GERMÁN SEGURA GARCÍA PALABRAS CLAVE: táctica de artillería, Siglo de las Luces, tecnolo-gía militar. ABSTRACT The eighteenth century was a period of great technological advances affecting many areas of life, armies among them and, particularly, the arti-llery. For the first time in History all in the war seemed likely to be quanti-fied, to be reduced to mathematical calculations: the war of siege reached an extreme perfection, advances in ballistics helped to systematize the she-lling, the drill became automated and the armies transformed into a fighting machine whose benefits depended largely on the precision of each piece in the set. The aim of this paper, which was one of the two Spanish contribu-tions to the 38th Congress of Military History (Sofia, 2012), is to analyse the integration of the artillery into the tactical deployments, that is, the role of the artillery in the battlefield aside the other elements of combat. Focusing on the eighteenth century, the most important military improvement was the gradual lightening of the materials and the increasing contribution of the artillery to the success of the armies in battle. So, we will just reflect systematically this evolution without losing sight of the solutions given by other countries considered more advanced, militarily talking, than Spain. KEY WORDS: Artillery Tactics, Enlightenment, Military Technology. * * * * * Introducción Afinales del siglo XVII se empieza a imponer lentamente en Europa una realidad, una nueva actitud del hombre ante la vida, resultado de décadas de avances científicos que habían venido arrojando luz sobre los misterios de un universo hasta entonces cerrado, sometido a una interpretación escatológica de la existencia y entendido a partir de la revela-ción divina. La Europa de la Ilustración, el llamado Siglo de las Luces, es un periodo que aparece claramente definido en la historia, aun conviviendo con un pasado clásico del que es heredero, su hijo emancipado. Será en pleno siglo XVIII, favorecido por un perfeccionamiento de las instancias de poder y el creciente fortalecimiento del Estado, cuando se constate la modifica- Revista de Historia Militar, 115 (2014), pp. 219-250. ISSN: 0482-5748
REVISTA DE HISTORIA MILITAR 115
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