Quote Originally Posted by Clistenes View Post
But in Turnhout the Habsburg's army (there were only around 50 Spaniards among 4300 troops) were already retreating, escaping from a superior army. The Dutch cavalry caught them during said retreat, charging their rear, and the German regiments surrended without a fight, and the the Walloons escaped. Only the Italians fought back, until their leader was killed and they ran too.

It could be argued that the Dutch cavalry (supported by English musketeers) didn't break the Habsburg army, but just stopped their retreat, and that it was the sight of the main body of the enemy army approaching them what made the German and Walloon troops to lose heart and surrender or run away, leaving the Italians very badly outnumbered against the enemy infantry that was closing on them, so they escaped too when their leader Varas was killed.

And the Dutch cuirassiers didn't use the caracola, but rather repeated charges head on against the enemy, stopping and shooting all at the same time only when they were very close.

I have read that the caracola was very ineffective because infantry gunmen could take better aim from their static positions, which combined with the size of the horses and the short range of the pistols compensated for the greater dispersion of the cavalry, and anyways, while the rate of fire of the horsemen was continuous, whey could shoot very few bullets per minute, which diminished the psychological impact.

As for Nieuwpoort, the Tercios were, as you have said yourself, very tired and weakened already.
That's sort of getting nitpicky about what a "caracole" actually is. Sometimes fire by rank was performed with essentially a stationary countermartch, sometimes each rank would first charge forward a ways before firing and then retiring to the rear, sometimes they would stop to shoot, other times they would shoot while moving, etc.

Here's the quote from Sir Francis Vere, "we charged their pikes, not breaking through them at the first push, as was anciently used by the men-at-arms with their barded horses: but as the long pistols, delivered at hand [i.e. fired at very short range], had made the ranks thin, so thereupon, the rest of the horse got within them."

The attached shot was seen as the one thing that could keep a pike square from being destroyed by pistolers or mounted harquebusiers, sure, but that hardly means that they were useless. Nor was a successful defense necessarily a sure thing. The cavalry were usually better paid and better trained than the infantry and the infantry square still made a very dense target. In addition the arquebusiers were typically unarmored and it was no guarantee that a single body would be enough to stop a pistol bullet. If the men in front ever do lose heart then bad things tend to happen to pike squares once the front ranks start shuffling backwards. Also keep in mind that it's the cavalry who get to decide where and when to attack, while the infantry must essentially remain stationary.

The fire from successive ranks was generally necessary for pistol cavalry in order to maximize the amount of fire from a deep formation and concentrate fire more effectively. It's similar to how countermartch volleys became necessary for Dutch infantry tactics. Pistols especially were most effective at fairly short distances, so a single thin rank 100 horses wide, in addition to being rather unwieldy, isn't going to concentrate their fire as effectively as 10 ranks of 10 horses delivering pistol shots to a single area in quick succession at close range.