(^80) Chapter Three
tiers required the same delicate combination of diplomatic negotia
tion, military readiness, and financial acumen that was needed for
successful management of close-in defense of the city and its depen
dent territory. Perhaps the relationship should be put the other way:
skills and aptitudes developed for the successful pursuit of long
distance trade, upon which the wealth and power of the great cities of
Italy had come to depend, provided the model and context within
which Italians invented a new and distinctively European pattern of
diplomacy and war.
The system maintained strong incentives for continued im
provements of weapons design. When many different purchasers en
tered the market, and many different artisan shops produced arms and
armor for the public, any change in design that cheapened the product
or improved its performance could be counted on to attract prompt
attention and propagate itself rapidly. Accordingly an arms race, of the
kind that has often manifested itself among European peoples subse
quently, broke out in the fourteenth century. It centered mainly in
Italy. The effect at first was to confirm and strengthen the formidabil
ity of Italian armed forces; before long, however, new weaponry
began to favor larger states and more powerful monarchs.
As long as the race lay between ever more efficient crossbows and
more and more elaborate plate armor, Italian workshops and artisan
designers kept the lead. This was the agenda of the fourteenth cen
tury, beginning with the introduction of a simple “stirrup” (1301)
(known in China since the eleventh century) that allowed archers to
cock their crossbows faster, and going on to the design of increasingly
powerful bows, substituting steel for wood in the arc of the bow after
about 1350, and then employing a windlass to pull back the string
(1370).^10 Thereafter, crossbow design stood still. Inventiveness con
centrated instead on gunpowder weapons. But before that time, each
improvement in the power of crossbows was matched by improve
ments in the design of armor. Milan was a major locus for the man
ufacture of armor, but the production of crossbows does not seem to
have had any comparable center, unless it was Genoa. That city be
came famous among northern rulers as the place from which to recruit
crossbowmen; and perhaps the Genoese enjoyed a certain primacy in
crossbow manufacture. But hard data seem lacking.
The next episode in the technological race between offensive and
- Ralph W. F. Payne-Gallwey, The Crossbow, Medieval and Modern, Military and
Sporting: Its Construction, History and Management (London, 1903), pp. 62–91 and
passim.