CHAPTER SIX: FROM PRINCES TO PRINCELY STATES: 1494–1648

 

1. Compare Dante, The Inferno, trans. Robert Pinsky (Noonday Press, 1996), Canto III, 11.5–6, 24 – 25. (“No things before me not eternal.”)

2. Adam Watson, The Evolution of International Society (Routledge, 1992), 143.

3. Eric Christiansen, The Northern Crusades: The Baltic and the Catholic Frontier, 1100 – 1525 (Macmillan, 1980), 250 – 251.

4. See Watson, n. 106, chapters 13 and 14 generally.

5. John Keegan, A History of Warfare (Hutchison, 1993). His predecessor, Charles VII, had used bombards to great effect earlier in the century. Harfleur, which had successfully resisted long sieges in 1415 and 1440, fell to Charles in only seventeen days after an attack by sixteen bombards. See Christopher Allmand in The Cambridge Illustrated History of Warfare, ed. Geoffrey Parker (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

6. Quoted in M. E. Mallet, “Diplomacy and War in Later Fifteenth Century Italy,” Proceedings of the British Academy, 67 (1981): 267 – 288.

7. Keegan, A History of Warfare, 320 – 322.

8. Michael T. Clark, “Realism: Ancient and Modern,” Political Science and Politics 26, no. 3 (September 1993): 491.

9. Samuel E. Finer, “State and Nation-Building in Europe,” in The Formation of Nation States in Western Europe, ed. Charles Tilly (Princeton University Press, 1975), 74.

10. Wallace K. Ferguson, Europe in Transition (Houghton Mifflin, 1962), 153 – 155.

11. Such was the rise of Francesco Sforza, a condottiere who became Duke of Milan by ex-ploiting the state apparatus that the Visconti had developed. Franco Catalano, Francesco Sforza (Dall' Oglio, 1983); Cecilia Ady, “The Invasions of Italy,” New Cambridge Modern History, ed. G. R. Potter (Cambridge, U.K., 1960), 1, 344; Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, vol. 1 (Harper & Row, 1958), 34 – 44.

12. See Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, Fifteenth – Eighteenth Century, vol. 3, The Perspective of the World, trans. Sian Reynolds (Harper & Row, 1984), 120; see also Michael Knapton, “City Wealth and State Wealth in Northeast Italy, Fourteenth – Seventeenth Centuries,” in La ville, la bourgeoisie, et la genèse de l'état moderne, XIIe – XVIIIe siècles: Actes du colloque de Bielefeld, 29 novembre – I décembre 1985, ed. Neithard Bulst and Jean-Philippe Genet (Editions du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique: Diffusion, Presses du CNRS, 1988).

13. Niccolò Machiavelli, last chapter in The Prince.

14. Michael Howard, War in European History (Oxford, 1976), 5.

15. Felix Gilbert, “Machiavelli: The Renaissance of the Art of War,” in Makers of Modern Strategy, ed. Peter Paret (Princeton University Press, 1986), 12 – 13.

16. Machiavelli, The Prince, chapter 12.

17. Machiavelli, The Discourses, III, 31.

18. Machiavelli, The Prince (trans. L. Ricci, 1903: rev., 1935), 43 – 44.

19. John Addington Symonds, A Short History of the Renaissance in Italy (Scribner, 1893), 4.

20. Of which scutage, which dates from the high Middle Ages, was a harbinger.

21. Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (Random House, 1987), 23; see also John Ulric Nef, War and Human Progress: An Essày on the Rise of Industrial Civilization (Russell & Russell, 1950), 46.

22. Lynn, citing recent scholarship on state formation in early modern Europe, recognizes this link between war and emerging absolutism. See also Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, A.D. 900 – 1990 (B. Blackwell, 1990); Brian Downing, The Military Revolution and Political Change (Princeton University Press, 1992); and David Kaiser, Politics and War: European Conflict from Philip II to Hitler (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990).

23. Adam Watson, The Evolution of International Society (Routledge, 1992), 164.

24. Ibid., 146.

25. Ibid., 161.

26. Clifford Rogers, “Military Evolution,” in The Reader's Companion to Military History, ed. Robert Cowley and Geoffrey Parker (Houghton Mifflin, 1996), 396.

27. Geoffrey Parker, The Military Revolution, 12.

28. Bert S. Hall and Kelly R. DeVries, “The Military Revolution Revisited,” Technology and Culture (July 1990): 500 – 507, take issue with Parker but on different grounds, i.e., they assume the premise that such fortresses would affect the state's political order but deny that the effects were as large, or as attributable to fortress design, as Parker maintains; and see Simon Adams, “Tactics or Politics? The Military Revolution and Hapsburg Hegemony, 1525 – 1649,” in Tools of War, ed. John A. Lynn (University of Illinois Press, 1990), 28 – 52, and John Lynn, “The Trace Italienne and the Growth of Armies: The French Case,” Journal of Military History 55 (July 1991): 297 – 330.

29. Watson, 164.

30. Lynn, “Trace Italienne,” 322, speaking of the French experience.

31. Kennedy, 70.

32. Christopher Marlowe, The Famous Tragedy of the Rich Jew of Malta (Da Capo Press, 1971), 7.