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Concept
Tercio
Summary
A Tercio (ˈteɾθjo), Spanish for "[a] third") was a military unit of the Spanish Army during the reign of the Catholic Monarchs and the Spanish Habsburgs in the early modern period. The Tercios were renowned as the finest professional infantry in Europe for over a century and a half due to their effectiveness of their battlefield formations. They were the elite military units of the Spanish Monarchy and the essential pieces of the powerful land forces of the Spanish Empire, sometimes also fighting with the navy. The Spanish Tercios were a crucial step in the formation of modern European armies, made up of professional volunteers, instead of levies raised for a campaign or hired mercenaries typically used by other European countries of the time.
The Tercios internal administrative organization, and their battlefield formations and tactics, grew out of the innovations of Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba during the conquest of Granada and the Italian Wars in the 1490s and 1500s, being the first to effectively mix pikes and firearms (arquebuses). The Tercios marked a rebirth of battlefield infantry comparable to the Macedonian phalanxes and the Roman legions. Such formations distinguished themselves in famous battles such as the Battle of Bicocca (1522) and the Battle of Pavia (1525). Following their formal establishment in 1534, the Tercio was built upon their effective training and high proportion of "old soldiers" (veteranos), in conjunction with the particular elan imparted by the lower nobility who commanded them. The Tercios were finally replaced by regiments in the early eighteenth century.
From 1920, the name of Tercio was given to the formations of the newly created Spanish Legion; professional units then created to fight colonial wars in North Africa, similar to the French Foreign Legion. These formations are actually regiments bearing the name of Tercio as an honorary title.
During the Granada War (1482–1491), the soldiers of the Catholic Monarchs of Spain were divided into three classes: pikemen (modelled after the Swiss), swordsmen with shields, and crossbowmen supplemented with an early firearm the arquebus.
Official source
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