THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES

by Bobbitt, Philip

  Before the year 1494, wars were protracted, battles bloodless, the methods followed in besieging towns slow and uncertain… Hence it came about that the ruler of state could hardly be dispossessed. But the French, in their invasion of Italy, infused so much liveliness into our wars that whenever the open country was lost, the State was lost with it.6

  Facing such a strategic challenge, Italian cities could no longer simply rely on their high walls and fortified towns to protect them. Machiavelli, writing in 1519, said that after 1494, “[n]o wall exists, however thick, that artillery cannot destroy in a few days.” Suddenly walls, towers, moats—all were rendered obsolete.7 As a result, princes and oligarchs made a pact with an idea: the idea was that of the State, and its promise was to make the ruler secure. The State—a permanent infrastructure to gather the revenue, organize the logistical support, and determine the command arrangements required for the armies that would be required to protect the realm—was established to govern according to the will of the ruler. In time, however, it would become clear that it was not the prince's immortality that was gained by this move, but the State's. Just as Renaissance princes had found they needed more secure, more professional armed forces than the seasonal contributions of medieval knighthood could provide, so the new Renaissance state would gradually turn to less idiosyncratic guidance than that offered by princes in order to aggrandize its wealth and power.

  Thus, the modern state originated in the transition from the rule of princes to that of princely states that necessity wrought on the Italian peninsula at the end of the fifteenth century. It is certainly true that there were states before this period; but these, like the city-states of Thucydides, did not self-consciously think of themselves as juridical entities separate from (and sometimes operating in opposition to) the civil society.8 For Thucydides the State is never a thing—it has no “legal personality” as we might say. The State is always an irreducible community of human beings and never characterized as an abstraction with certain legal attributes apart from the society itself. The modern state, however, is an entity quite detachable from the society that it governs as well as from the leaders who exercise power. This detachment gives the State its potential for immortality.

  We can date the appearance of such a way of looking at the State to the time when the legal and material attributes of a human being were ascribed to the State itself. All the significant legal characteristics of the State—legitimacy, personality, continuity, integrity, and, most importantly, sovereignty—date from the moment at which these human traits, the constituents of human identity, were transposed to the State itself. This occurred when princes, to whom these legal characteristics had formerly been attached, required the services of a permanent bureaucracy in order to manage the demands of a suddenly more threatening strategic competition. (The first permanent legations, for example, accredited to a particular court rather than merely serving as temporary emissaries, date from this period.) This strategic competition provoked what Finer has defined as the essential characteristic of the modern state: that

  the paramount organ of government is subserved by specialized personnel; one the civil service, to carry out decisions, the other—the military service to back these by force where necessary and protect the association from other similarly constituted associations.9

  Strategic competition on the Italian peninsula provoked military innovation by Italian cities that were rich but weak. In the armies of the great powers, France, Aragon, and England, the number of soldiers raised by feudal levy was compounded with that raised by hiring mercenaries. Since the fourteenth century, however, the Italian cities had relied entirely on privately organized professional armed forces. Single groups—the compagna di ventura—were recruited, supplied, and paid by their commanders, the condottieri, who sold their services to the highest bidder. The necessity for, and later the ambition of, the condottieri was a crucial element in the creation of the first modern states. For it was these mercenaries whose expensive services animated the need for the princely state, and whose ambitions then exploited the legitimating resources of that state, once the transfer of legal personality from the person of the prince to the princely state had occurred.

  The condottiere was a contract employee. The word derives from the Italian for “contract,” condotta. The necessity to employ mercenaries became general on the peninsula once a few cities hired such forces because the shifting alliance structure of the region meant that no city could rely on the mercenaries of another.10 Once the superiority of the professionalized forces of the condottieri became clear, this innovation swept through all the cities of the peninsula as one after another mimicked the innovation lest it be engulfed by it. This necessity forced princes and oligarchs and ruling councils to rely more heavily on a bureaucratic apparatus, first to fund the condotte and later to provide for the acquisition of artillery. The condottieri themselves soon saw the advantage in turning their force on the authorities by whom they had been hired and supplanting them.

  To rule the city he had seized, however, the usurping condottiere needed legitimacy. The condottieri took their contracts from a prince or oligarchy and hence from them alone derived the condottiere's legal status. The princely state, however, once severed from the prince who brought it into being could provide a legal status for the condottiere apart from that of an employee of the prince or ruling council whom he had deposed. Thus this irony gave birth to the modern state and its unique problem, its problematic relation to the elusive status of legitimacy: only a State, however rudimentary, could provide the prince with the infrastructure necessary to maintain expensive mercenaries, but once this infrastructure was erected, it could also provide others with the means of exercising the power they had seized, 11 and legitimate their doing so.

  This reification of the State reshaped the international society that had come into being in the Middle Ages. The Italian peninsula was a perfect laboratory for such a new society: the principal political actors spoke a common language; they were physically proximate; none was so powerful as to make diplomacy irrelevant; repeated invasions by French, Spanish, and Imperial forces, throughout the period of this transition, were unable to establish an hegemony that could overcome a careful balance of opposing powers, which necessitated complex negotiations and intercourse; and, most importantly, the rulers of these cities faced a need for law that only an international society could satisfy, namely, the legitimation required by those who seized power by force or held it without the imprimatur of dynastic right. In these geopolitical circumstances, the Italian Renaissance produced the first princely states and, almost as a corollary, the inheritance by these entities of the legal status hitherto reserved for the persons of princes. Far too little attention is customarily paid by legal scholars to the effects of other states on a state's own constitutional system. In the Italian laboratory we can see the mimetic, competitive, reactive relationships among these states and the significance of these relationships for the constitutional order.

  The Italian peninsula was dominated by five city-realms: Rome, Naples, Milan, Florence, and Venice. The center of the Renaissance in Italy was Florence, whose situation was similar to that of the other city-realms. It was her solution to that situation that provided other cities with the form on which the princely state was modeled. What were the characteristics of the Italian situation within which Florence and other cities found themselves?

  First, the cities were defined geographically, as opposed to the usual springing dynastic inheritances of princes. Realms that were increased (or decreased) by the happenstance of inheritance and marriage often yielded disparate, unconnected properties scattered across Europe. This tended to fracture rather than consolidate a common culture. Second, the cities were wealthy—Florence had an annual income greater than that of the king of England and the revenue of Venice and its Terra Ferma at the middle of the fifteenth century was 60 percent higher than that of France, more than double that of England and Spain12—in a
world that had recently come to a money economy. These cities could afford a bureaucracy and profit by it. Third, the wealth of the cities was coveted by others; yet the cities had populations too small to create effective militias, and therefore required mercenaries. Fourth, the Italian rulers of these city-realms faced a new and menacing technology that threatened to make obsolete the sheltering walls and turrets that protected them from their French and Habsburg predators.

  This transition from prince to princely state provides us with an initial example of a strategic imperative animating a constitutional innovation—an instance, that is, where the insistent question of security in a specific context (geography, wealth, small population) yields a new legal solution and requires a story to rationalize that solution. If the constitutional innovation of the modern state was in part a response to the threat posed by mobile artillery to the walled cities of Italy, the precise shape of that response—the princely state—was not governed by strategic considerations alone, but also by the felt need to ensure legitimacy for the leadership that wedded its future to this new creation.

  A vulnerability rooted in questions of dynastic legitimacy underlay all the principal city-states of Italy. Consider the situation of the cities' leaders in 1454. In Milan, the dynastic line had ended in 1447; one candidate for the succession was Francesco Sforza, a condottiere and the husband of the last male heir's illegitimate daughter. The Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick III, claimed the Duchy of Milan as forfeit to the Empire, there being no rightful dynastic claimant. The Kings of France and Spain also pressed claims.

  Florence was effectively ruled by the Medicis, a banking house whose head, Cosimo, had returned in triumph from exile in 1434 to dominate the Signory, an oligarchical body. By his command of capital, Cosimo was able to affect events throughout Europe, including, for example, the Wars of the Roses (through loans to Edward IV), and to paralyze Naples and Venice by withholding credit that would have been used to finance mercenaries. Yet the Medici ruled by competence, not royal bloodlines, and thus always had to refresh their legitimacy through further successful acts on behalf of Florentine society.

  In Venice, the ruling group of merchant oligarchs, the Signoria, had led the city to an expansion on the mainland, seizing towns and fortresses from the Milanese—in an effort to make Venice self-sufficient in food—and also from the Empire, Naples, and the Papacy. Unlike the other cities, Venice was an international maritime power, but her new acquisitions made her vulnerable to a coalition of forces that would, ultimately, destroy her power. Precisely because she was a republic—Venice provided a model often referred to in the Federalist Papers by the American constitutional founders—she could not claim dynastic legitimacy, which became a more pressing issue once she expanded beyond her historic city lagoon.

  In Rome, the papacy was held by a Catalonian family, the Borgias. The fact that elections had been manipulated to permit more than one generation of a family to control the papacy only underscored the obvious: the pope, Alexander VI, behaved like a Renaissance prince, delegating papal authority to his children, and using the powers of the papacy, including excommunication, as diplomatic tools. Yet he did not have the legal imprimatur of a prince. Instead he became one in fact by virtue of a papal election, which cast doubt on not only his own legitimacy as a putative political monarch but also on his power to confer legitimacy on his heirs.

  Naples was in the possession of the Spanish king after a century of disputed successions, recurrent revolutions, turmoil, and anarchy. It provided an example to the other cities of what might happen to them if the great kings outside Italy were to invade the peninsula, as well as providing a base to Spain from which further adventures might be launched.

  Let us grant then that these cities were insecure and could profit from the legitimacy and focus of energy that a State could provide—why at this time? Surely there had been insecure oligarchies of dubious legitimacy before? Why did it take the psychological and cultural change that produced perspective in drawing and melody in music and the nude in modern painting—why did it take the Renaissance to create the princely state?

  Partly it was a matter of contrast with what had gone before. Renaissance skepticism about the deference owed to medieval authority fortuitously fed the necessities that led to the princely state. If the universal Church could not confer legitimacy, much less security, on the realms of the Renaissance prince, this was as much liberating as it was dismaying. The philosopher of the Renaissance who was most interested in the interplay between the internal constitution of the State and its external, strategic security wrote:

  If the various campaigns and uprisings which have taken place in Italy have given the appearance that military ability has become extinct, the true reason is that the old methods of warfare were not good and no one has been able to find new ones. A man newly risen to power cannot acquire greater reputation than by discovering new rules and methods.13

  This insight led its author, Niccolò Machiavelli, and others, to the constitutional outlook that framed the princely state.

  It was a sharp break with the perspective it superseded. Whereas the new Renaissance state intertwined the legal and the strategic, the medieval world had mingled the religious and military. As Sir Michael Howard has expressed it:

  Knighthood was a way of life, sanctioned and civilized by the ceremonies of the Church until it was almost indistinguishable from the ecclesiastical order of the monasteries… equally dedicated, equally holy, the ideal to which medieval Christendom aspired. This remarkable blend of Germanic warrior and Latin sacerdos lay at the root of all medieval culture.14

  In a society in which all activity had religious significance, the knight served God by serving his liege and by waging war according to rules laid down by the Church and delegated to temporal authority. The military relationship between vassal and lord, knight and liege, also reflected the economic relationship: the vassal was allotted property and accepted the obligation to provide military service to the lord in war. Thus arose a legal relationship that depended upon both economic realities and military imperatives. Both of these were transformed at the end of the medieval era; whether as a result or as a cause, the spiritual structure collapsed as well.

  When rapid expansion of a money economy shook the agricultural basis of medieval society, the effects of this development on military institutions were immediate…. [T]he great money powers of the period, the Italian cities, came to rely entirely on professional soldiers….

  New classes of men, freed from the preceding military traditions, were attracted into the services by money, and with this infiltration of new men, new weapons and new [tactics] could be introduced. [This evolution was accelerated by the development of artillery, which was expensive and favored the offense at the expense of fortifications and the feudal castle.] The moral code, traditions and customs, which feudalism had evolved, had lost control over the human material from which the armies were now recruited….War was no longer undertaken as a religious duty, the purpose of military service became financial gain.15

  Entrepreneurs are hardly likely to provide services for their customers that entail their own annihilation and the sacrifice of their capital. In Machiavelli's first diplomatic mission on behalf of the city of Florence, he negotiated the fees of a condottiere engaged in the efforts to regain Pisa. Observing at Pisa the mercenaries sent by the king of France, an ally of Florence in the campaign, he noted that these troops refused to advance against the city, mutinied, and finally simply disappeared. Indeed, during the last months of 1502, Machiavelli was present at Sinigaglia when Cesare Borgia persuaded a number of hostile condottieri to meet with him and had them murdered once they arrived. These events confirmed for Machiavelli the weaknesses of reliance on the condottieri and the need for a ruthless and decisive political leader.

  Machiavelli devised the following proposals: (1) Florence should have a conscripted militia: the love of gain would inevitably corrupt the condottiere who would avoid d
ecisive battles to preserve his forces, betray his employers to a higher bidder, and seize power when it became advantageous; (2) the prince had to create institutions that would evoke loyalty from his subjects which in other countries was provided by the feudal structure of vassalage, but which had in Italy been lost with the collapse of medieval society; (3) legal and strategic organization are interdependent: “there must be good laws where there are good arms and where there are good arms there must be good laws.”16 “Although I have elsewhere maintained that the foundation of states is a good military organization, yet it seems to me not superfluous to report here that without such a military organization there can neither be good laws nor anything else good”; 17 (4) deceit and violence are wrong for an individual, but justified when the prince is acting in behalf of his state; (5) permanent embassies and sophisticated sources of intelligence must be maintained in order to enable successful diplomacy; and (6) the tactics of the prince, in law and in war, must be measured by a rational assessment of the contribution of those tactics to the strategic goals of statecraft, which are governed by the contingencies of history. All of these conclusions compel a final one: princes must develop the princely state.

  The princely state enables the prince to rationalize his acts on the basis of ragione di stato. He is not acting merely on his own behalf, but is compelled to act in service of the State. Notice how the very word state undergoes a transformation in this period from its Latin root status meaning a “state of affairs,” to the State as an institutionalized “situation.” By extending the power of the prince, the State replaces the lost relationship of vassalage and its obligations to an overlord with a citizen's duty, a crucial change if Machiavelli's conscript army was ever to become a reality. He urged a system in which a civil bureaucracy would replace the strategic and legal roles of vassals. Civil servants would provide a more reliable infrastructure.18 Perhaps the most important official reflection of Machiavelli's statecraft is the statute of December 1505, which ordered the organization of a Florentine militia. This law was drafted by Machiavelli, and the preamble announces some of Machiavelli's fundamental views, especially the idea that the foundation of a republic is “justice and arms,” that is, the intertwining of constitutional and strategic capabilities. It is significant also that a statute embodies these ideas because a princely state requires laws, whereas a prince acting alone needs only decrees. This is an essential movement toward the formation of public rather than private authority.