The Business of War in Europe, 1000–1600 77The existence of such rivalries and the difficulty of adjusting them
smoothly was, indeed, the principal weakness of the Venetian and
Milanese military systems. No single captain could be appointed
commander-in-chief of all Venetian armed forces without creating
such jealousy among the subordinate commanders as to invite irra
tional displays of prowess or explicit disobedience on the field of
battle. Only by assigning rival captains to separate “fronts” could fric
tion be avoided; but this, of course, reduced the flexibility and military
value of the armed establishment as a whole. Sforza, too, had similar
problems in adjusting relationships among his subordinate command
ers after his takeover of Milan in 1450.
The way around this sort of inefficiency was for civil administrators
to enter into contractual relationships with smaller and smaller units,
down to the single “lance.” This practice became increasingly common
in both Venice and Milan by the 1480s. Civil officials thereby acquired
a far greater control over the state’s armed forces, since they now
could appoint whomever they wished to command an appropriate
number of assembled “lances.” The effect was to promote the emer
gence of a corps of officers whose careers depended more on ties with
civic officials who had the power of appointment and less on ties with
the particular soldiers who from time to time might come under a
given officer’s command. Such a pattern of subordination assured
effective political control of organized force. Coups d etat ceased
to be a serious threat.
A remarkably flexible and efficient system of warfare, relating
means to ends according to financial as well as diplomatic calculations,
thus came into being in the Po valley by the end of the fifteenth
century. Its establishment constituted a second stage in the institu
tional adjustment to the commercialization of warfare by Italian cities.
Obviously, since states were relatively few and individual “lances”
were numerous, terms of trade tilted strongly in favor of the employer
and against the employee. The entire evolution, indeed, may be
viewed as a development from a nearly free market (when blackmail
and plundering defined protection costs by means of innumerable
local “market” transactions) towards oligopoly (when a few great cap
tains and city administrators made and broke contracts), followed by
quasi-monopoly within each of the larger and better-administered
states into which Italy divided. From a different point of view, one
may say that an almost unadulterated cash nexus gave way by degrees
to more complex linkages among armed men and with their em-