Art of War in the Renaissance

Abstract

To understand Renaissance military theory, one needs to start out from its ancient and medieval heritage. The Roman and Byzantine literature on the topic was quite narrow but still for a long time determined European military thought. Compared to these tracts on strategy and tactics, Florentine humanists introduced new themes and new arguments, a whole new approach to battlefield success and military participation.

While Bruni was perhaps the first explicit representative of this new, Florentine understanding of waging wars, this entry focuses of Niccolò Machiavelli’s ideas on the art of war. The part addressing this issue in his The Prince established a direct connection between the art of war and that of governing the state. This was dictated by his experiences of the returning armed conflicts among the city-states and some of the major European powers in Italy.

But even more significantly, his work The Art of War is perhaps the best known example of a Renaissance dialogue which argued for the citizens’ militia instead of the use of mercenary troops. Contrary to our intuition, he is as close here to a realist political position as in The Prince. The dialogue argues that a dedicated military personnel makes colonization a more promising enterprise, while at home it may help the Prince (or the popolo itself, directly) to rearrange the political regime.

In other words, Machiavelli found a number of strong arguments why a popular army is a much more rational choice to rely on, than a mercenary troop would have been, in his patria. His arguments sound surprisingly modern, even if history did not fully confirm his ideas on the short term, leading to the loss of popular government in Florence.