The medieval system had been a rights-based system. Each member of that society had a particular place that determined rights, obligations, and a well-defined role. It is a familiar but erroneous portrait of the medieval era that depicts its society as uniform and colorless. Rights-based systems can in fact yield enormous diversity, because though conformity may be enforced by law, it is not necessarily enforced by that most pitiless of masters, the individual ambition; thus such systems often encourage creativity, as the natural exuberance of individuals attempts to circumvent the rigidity of their assigned roles and the received wisdom. Yet these systems often strike us as irrational in practice because they do not attempt to match talent and performance with role. Perhaps that is why contemporary philosophers today who urge us to adopt rights-based systems often must resort to hypothesized situations like the Rawlsian veil of ignorance, behind which each person must choose a distributive system he or she would prefer without knowing what particular person one turned out to be.
What rights-based systems reject, then, is rationality applied to the contingent situation. Thus the Franciscans imprisoned Roger Bacon for his scientific speculations; the Dominicans preached crusades against the cultivated nobles of Toulouse; the Benedictines erased masterpieces of classical literature in order to copy litanies, and sold pieces of parchment for charms.19 And even though Aquinas, Duns Scotus, and William of Ock-ham were rigorous logicians, only Aquinas applied this rigor to the analysis of their political condition.
The spirit of the Renaissance, by contrast, was quickened by curiosity, piqued of course by the recovery of classical models that provided an alternative to the medieval paradigms, but driven relentlessly by a need for inquiry into the place of temporal man himself. Copernicus and Galileo; Vesalius and Harvey; Leonardo and Michelangelo; Petrarch and Boccaccio—all had this in common: a desire to see man's contingent situation as it is. This draws the light of rationality back onto the viewer. In the medieval period, there had been a universal system of customary law, based on the rights of inheritance, charters, and grants. Customary law is the common law of practices. We are inclined today to think of common law as generated by courts, but this is really an abbreviation: common law is simply the customary law of the judiciary; it grows and is modified by the exercise of court practices. The medieval period was almost entirely ruled by a kind of common law, but the generating institutions of that law were seldom judicial courts.
When these institutions began to malfunction—as, for instance, when the introduction of a money economy broke down the rights-relations of lord and vassal with regard to military service20—and new practices developed (such as the professional, mercenary army), the questioning figures of the Renaissance tried to design institutions that would improve on the merely customary (for example, Machiavelli's plan for a conscripted militia drawn from the Florentine population).
Precisely because the inherited institutions were rights-based, they could not promote new arrangements that were violative of the customary methods. A prince alone could not rewrite the constitutional rules of his society's governance to meet his own needs; that would require an institution that objectified the needs of the prince but was distinct from the prince himself. In Italy, the development of such an institution was catalyzed by the strategic threats facing the city-states.
From 1494, Italy became the prize for which Spain and France contended, with local allies, in the first modern epochal war. All eyes were focused on the security of these fragile cities. Men of letters and artists were urged to design countermeasures to the bronze cannon that invaded Italy in 1494. Leonardo's notebooks of this period contain sketches for a machine gun, a primitive tank, and a steam-powered cannon, 21 and Michelangelo repeatedly submitted drawings of fortifications that he thought would withstand bombardment by the new technology of artillery.
The medieval world had been roughly split in two halves. In the west, there were realms where dynastic power had devolved on princes who were hemmed in by customary law, the autonomy of their vassals, and the local rights of towns. These were realms where legitimacy was solid, but the power of the prince circumscribed. In the east, in central Europe, princes were subject to the dual universality of the pope and the emperor, both elected rulers representing complex sets of competing interests. As cities in Italy and princely realms in the Netherlands and parts of Germany began to assert their independence and to accumulate wealth and power, they found themselves subject to assaults on their legitimacy, because their assertions of independence were not endorsed by the papacy or the empire.
Western kings, in particular, came to realize the significance of the [Italian innovation] and of the much greater power which Italian rulers were able to concentrate in their own hands…. True, the most conspicuous Italians, from the Medicis, the Sforzas and the Borgias down to dozens of smaller rulers, had power without legitimacy. The western kings had legitimacy without much effective power…22
The Italian solution, adopted, for example, by the pope himself, was the princely state. The pope became a prince, and the Roman Church his state. Western kings envied the power that this innovation was able to concentrate in the hands of the prince. Thus,
[t]hose rulers who understood best the political lessons to be learnt from Renaissance Italy set about turning the legitimate but shadowy medieval overlordship of their realms into a [princely state] on the grand scale, with themselves as the real and absolute masters within the boundaries of their kingdom.23
These possibilities presented themselves: either a prince could seize power and form a state; or if one had the good fortune to inherit a kingdom, one could transform it from a realm into a princely state. (A realm, in contrast to a state, has only customary political structures; for example, it has no permanent bureaucracy, diplomatic corps, or armies.) Which option was available was largely determined by history and geography. Thus the first option was the way of the city rulers who had not come to power by virtue of dynastic inheritance (this was the pattern of the Sforzas, the Borgias, the Medicis), but it was also, to a certain degree, the situation of Henry Tudor, who, though presenting dynastic claims, ended a civil war by force. The second choice was made by Louis XI, the king of France, the largest and richest realm in the west. After he inherited the throne, he systematically reduced the power of the nobility, the Church, and the parliaments of his realm by force and deceit, and established a princely state on the Italian model that was particularly attractive to the towns and cities that he enriched even as he circumscribed their political independence.24 Similarly, in Spain, the dynastic marriage of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile brought a legitimate inheritance of great wealth and territory, which was transformed by Ferdinand's internal, centralizing policies, and by what can justly be called a Florentine foreign policy. This transformation yielded a princely state of transcontinental ambition. Fueled by the wealth of the Americas, Spain reached its apogee during this period. By contrast, the Habsburg king, Maximilian, inherited realms that were not geographically contiguous, and his election as emperor simply found him opposed by princes—in Bavaria, Saxony, Prussia—who were themselves in the process of creating princely states. In this situation, Maximilian wished to subsume the princely states of his competitors in a new European imperium.
One conspicuous feature of the Italian system was the balance of power. We owe this concept to the Medici (balances are, after all, a banking concept), but, as we will see, this idea only came into being in the modern world when there was an international society—the Italian society of princely states—and, of course, the reflection upon the nature and requirements of that society by a shrewd and lucid ruler. Francesco Sforza proposed an alliance to Lorenzo de Medici in order to oppose the growing power of Venice, which had seized territory on the Italian mainland. Sforza suggested that if Venice were not rebuffed, she would by her conquests become so much richer that she would be able to hire condottieri capable of enlarging the Venetian state even further and by t
his process eventually dominate the Italian peninsula. Lorenzo agreed, but he qualified his consent by observing that Venice must not be destroyed, because this would weaken the forces that might one day be needed to coalesce in order to oppose the power of Rome or the Empire. Doubtless Lorenzo also did not want to so strengthen his own ally by giving Milan sole control over the rich valley of the Po, as to tempt Sforza into his own bid for hegemony. Therefore the reply from Florence contained the historic phrase “the affairs of Italy must be kept in balance.” This is the compensating idea to Machiavelli's observation that the princely state always has an urge to expand.25
The development of princely states alone was not enough to create an international society beyond Italy. Rather this came about, bringing with it notions of a law among states, owing to the need to maintain a balance of power in order to protect against the strongest princely state, Spain. First, however, the overarching power of the universal Church had to be broken, so that states could develop on a territorial basis with subjects who looked to the state rather than elsewhere for allegiance. The universal Church, in medieval times, was the uniting system within which an international society of princes could begin to develop; once these members became princely states, the Church (and the Empire) were a hindrance to the development of a society of states.
The story I have just told is a straightforward one. At its center was the realization by the Italian city-realms of the late fifteenth century that the high, fortified walls that had protected their citizens and their riches would be battered to bits by the introduction of artillery into siege campaigns. Once this fact became apparent, reliance on mercenary forces became problematic: if troops had to leave their fortresses and actually fight decisive battles to protect the city, then mercenary condottieri were dubious men for the job. Why should they risk not only their lives but their investment on behalf of a temporary employer? They would have to be compensated for such risks. These two realizations—which were plain to contemporary commentators—form the parentheses within which the princely state existed. It was created in order to provide a secure infrastructure and revenue base for hiring mercenaries; it flourished to serve the needs of the mercenaries themselves, especially the maintenance of legitimacy; it withered and was everywhere superseded because it could not field forces to match the commitments of states that were larger, richer, and, above all, animated by transcendent motives less vulnerable to the transient allegiances of paid captains. Machiavelli's hope that reifying the State would encourage loyalty and sacrifice was not misplaced, but his view that a citizen militia relying on these qualities could substitute for mercenaries was.
The princely state allied the dynastic conventions of medieval feudalism with the constitutional innovation of a distinct and objectified state. This was a secular move, as is most dramatically evident in the secularization of the papal states. When it was followed by a sectarian reaction—motivated in part by disgust at this transformation of the papacy and the Church—princely states attempted to call forth the sacrifice and endurance required by the new forms of warfare by relying on sectarian appeals. To a large degree, they succeeded, and the result was the epochal Thirty Years' War. States the size of cities, however, could not muster the revenues necessary to wage war on the new, vast scale that they themselves had inadvertently brought into being, and the Italian plain ceased to be the incubator of constitutional orders.
The ultimate solution to the artillery threat to the fortified town lay in a new design for fortresses. The bastioned trace—a “trace” being a blueprint or outline—is believed to have originated in Italy and has come down to us as the trace italienne for that reason. With this design military architects remade the vulnerable fortress wall into a formidable defensive platform for fire. The high walls that had hitherto characterized fortified cities were made lower and thicker to present less prominent and less fragile targets to besieging artillery. Doing so, however, entailed an additional vulnerability because close assaults could exploit the dead zones along the walls or within the interstices created by square or circular towers. The solution was found in erecting projecting bastions on which could be mounted weapons that covered these blind spots. Then the walls themselves, whose surfaces were slanted to deflect bombards, were buttressed on the inside by earth, so that their defenders could rely on the walls to absorb the force of projectiles. A ditch outside the exterior wall heightened the effect of the fortress wall without making it high enough to crumble or topple when struck. Because the defenders were now firing from behind as much as twenty feet of earth, they were masked from the ditches directly below. These designs forced the besieger to pay a heavy price in time and manpower, but they also extracted costs from the besieged:
These new fortresses, characterized by thick sunken walls and a snowflake-shaped plan that enabled the defenders to sweep every foot of the walls with enfolding cannon fire, proved capable of resisting artillery bombardment and assault alike. To ensure their control over these expensive, powerful and strategically important fortifications, the central governments of Renaissance states increasingly garrisoned them with regular standing armies…. To recruit, train, pay and supply these troops required unprecedented amount of money, larger military and fiscal bureaucracies and correspondingly higher taxes. The military expenditures of the Spanish monarchy, for example, increased roughly twentyfold between 1500 and 1650, a 300% increase even after adjusting for inflation.26
Although the first bastion design dates from the 1480s, it was the French invasion of Italy in 1494 that produced the trace italienne and the desperate efforts of the princely states to erect them. In 1553, faced with the prospect of an attack, the city of Siena tried to fortify itself using the new architecture. When the attack came the next year, even though few of the projected walls had been finished, so much had already been spent on fortification that Siena had no funds left to raise a relief army and the city surrendered unconditionally in 1555.
Such fortresses drove up the size and cost of armies in two ways: large numbers of troops were required for lengthy sieges because the fortress was too formidable a redoubt to be left in the rear of an advancing army; and this meant that, to be most effective, the new fortresses required large garrisons that could successfully pursue an evacuating force. As a consequence, the dominant constitutional form began to move away from the smaller, princely states to kingly states, a transition that can be seen as the Italian strategic innovations moved north in the 1530s. By then over a hundred Italian engineers were working in France on the kingdom's northern defenses. By 1544 more than a dozen such fortresses lay along the border with the Netherlands, defended by more than a thousand artillery pieces. At the same time, other Italians were working for the Habsburg realm at a staggering cost. The fortified center of a single city, Antwerp, with nine bastions, cost one million florins ($150,000) and between 1529 and 1572, some forty-three kilometers of defenses of the new style27 were built in the Netherlands at a cost of ten million florins ($1.5 million).*
The French introduction of mobile artillery into Italy in 1494 had set in train a series of events by which princes and oligarchs found it necessary to set up bureaucracies, first in order to raise money for mercenaries and fortress renovation, and then to give those same mercenaries and oligarchs legitimacy. Once created as a mere instrument of the prince, the State took on a life of its own, and a succession of constitutional orders arose that interacted with changes in the strategic environment.
Whereas princely states became progressively discontinuous, as dynastic inheritance and marriage added property, and progressively more sectarian, as these states sought to unite ecclesiastical and political bases of legitimacy, the new forms of kingly states were geographically centralized and coolly rational where religious matters were concerned.
One can go further. Once the princely state came into being, territorial conceptions of strategy replaced those of purely dynastic motivation. This development was masked in the Italian experience
because the cities were the states: their fortification was a minimum criterion for survival. As we shall see, however, in the struggle of kingly states massive fortress lines became the centerpiece of military policy and contemporary techniques of siege warfare dictated the forces sufficient to garrison such lines.30 To summarize the development described in this chapter, we may turn to Paul Kennedy, who writes of this period:
The post 1450 waging of war was intimately connected with [state formation]… There were various causes for this evolution… But it was war, and the consequences of war, that provided a much more urgent and continuous pressure toward “nation-building” than these philosophical considerations and slowly evolving social tendencies…. Above all, it was war—and especially the new techniques which favored the growth of infantry armies and expensive fortification and fleet—which impelled belligerent states to spend more money, [to develop] new organizations for revenue collecting, [to effect] the changing relationship between kings and estates in early modern Europe.31
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