78 Chapter Threeployers. These linkages combined esprit de corps with bureaucratic
subordination, loyalty to a commander, and (in Venice at least) also to
the state.
However complex and variable from case to case, the overall result
was to stabilize relationships between the civil and military elements
in Italian society. This in turn allowed the leading Italian city-states to
function as great powers in the politics of the age. In 1508, for exam
ple, the Venetians staved off attack by the so-called League of Cam
brai, in which Pope Julius II, Emperor Maximilian, the king of France,
and the king of Spain combined against them. Only in collision with
the Turks did Venetian military might prove insufficient.
Later, when Italian cities became pawns and prizes in the wars be
tween France and Spain, observers like Machiavelli (d. 1527) came to
disdain the virtuosity with which Venice and Milan had adapted their
administrative practices to the dictates of an age in which human
relations in general and military relations in particular could no longer
be managed on a face-to-face basis in accordance with custom and
status, but responded instead to impersonal and imperfectly under
stood market relations. Until very recently, Machiavelli’s attack on
mercenary soldiering seemed persuasive to nineteenth- and twen
tieth-century historians whose own experience of war emphasized the
value of citizen-soldiers and patriotism. But in an age when military
professionalism promises to make citizen-soldiers obsolete once again,
scholars have begun to recognize the way in which the best-governed
Italian cities anticipated, in the fifteenth century, military arrangements
that became standard north of the Alps some two centuries later.^9
The fact remains that by collecting tax monies to pay soldiers who
proceeded to spend their wages and thereby helped to refresh the tax
base, Italian city administrations showed how a commercially articu
lated society could defend itself effectively. By inventing adminis
trative methods for controlling soldiers and tying their self-interest
more and more closely to continued service with the same employer,
these cities altered the incidence of instability inherent in market
relationships.
- These remarks on Italian military organization depend primarily on Mallett’s
magnificent book Mercenaries and Their Masters, and his chapter “Venice and Its Con
dottieri, 1404–54” in John R. Hale, ed., Renaissance Venice (London, 1973), pp. 131–45.
Cf. also John R. Hale, “Renaissance Armies and Political Control: The Venetian Prov
editorial System, 1509–1529 "Journal of Italian History 2 (1979): 11–31, and Piero
Pieri, Il Rinascimento e la crisi militare italiana (Turin, 1952), which offers abundant
information but generally endorses the traditionally negative appraisal of mercenary
soldiering.