THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES

by Bobbitt, Philip

  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.

  CHAPTER SEVEN: FROM KINGLY STATES TO TERRITORIAL STATES: 1648 – 1776

  1. William Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act I, Scene 2, lines 94 – 100. The Yale Shakespeare, ed. W. L. Cross and Tucker Brooke (Barnes & Noble, 1993), p. 1408.

  2. Peter Mancias, “The Legitimation of the Modern State: A Historical and Structural Account,” in State Formation and Political Legitimacy, ed. R. Cohen and J. D. Toland (Transaction Books, 1988), 173 – 176.

  3. Tilly, Coercion, Capital, 14.

  4.Michael Howard, War in European History, 20; “Historians indeed normally date the beginnings of ‘Modern European History' from the Italian Wars which opened with the French invasion of 1494.”

  5. Jeremy Black, who is in a position to know, makes this claim. Jeremy Black, European Warfare, 1660 – 1815 (Yale University Press, 1994), 3.

  6. Parker, The Military Revolution, 19. In this wonderfully written and illustrated book, Parker actually provides a plate reproducing William Louis's original letter, with a diagram in the count's hand showing how the countermarch would work.

  7. Richard Bonney, The European Dynastic States, 1494 – 1660 (Oxford University Press, 1991), 524 – 525.

  8. Max Weber, from Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, trans. and ed. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (Oxford University Press, 1946), 256 – 257.

  9. Gunther E. Rothenberg, “Maurice of Nassau, Gustavus Adolphus, Raimondo Monte-cucolli, and the ‘Military Revolution' of the Seventeenth Century,” in Makers of Modern Strategy: From Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age, ed. Peter Paret (Princeton, 1986), 33.

  10. Roberts, Essays in Swedish History, 204 –205, 210; see also Paul Kennedy's observation that “each belligerent had to learn how to create a satisfactory administrative structure to meet the ‘military revolution’; and of equal importance, it also had to devise new means of paying for the spiraling costs of war.” Kennedy, 56.

  11. McNeill, Pursuit of Power, 80, 95.

  12. Black, European Warfare, 1660 – 1815, 4.

  13. Jean Bodin, Six Books of the Commonwealth, ed. K. D. McRae (Harvard University Press, 1962), 200.

  14. Nicholas Henshell, The Myth of Absolutism: Change and Continuity in Early Modern European Monarchy (Longman, 1992), 3–4.

  15. Thomas Hobbes, Behemoth, William Olesworth, ed. (B. Franklin, 1963).

  16. Konrad Repgen, “What Is a ‘Religious War‘?” in Politics and Society in Reformation Europe, ed. E. I. Kouri and Tom Scott (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987), 319; quoted in Bonney, 550.

  17. Kennedy, 52.

  18. Ibid., 25.

  19. A Habsburg prince was emperor from 1273 to 1291, 1298 to 1308, 1438 to 1740, and 1745 to 1806.

  20. Roberts, 202.

  21.Geoffrey Symcox, War, Diplomacy, and Imperialism, 1618 – 1763 (Walker, 1974), 103 – 105.

  22. Roberts, 24.

  23. Quoted in Michael Roberts, Gustavus Adolphus (Longman, 1992), 29 – 30
.

  24. Roberts, 31.

  25. Kennedy, 64 – 65, citing several works by Roberts (“What follows relies heavily upon the writings of Michael Roberts,…”), see vol 1.

  26. Howard, War in European History, 59.

  27. This account is taken from Roberts's superb Gustavus Adolphus.

  28. E. A. Beller, “The Thirty Years War,” New Cambridge Modern History, vol. 4 (ed. J. P. Cooper) (Cambridge, 1970), 354. Note that this is to be distinguished from “sovereignty.”

  29. Barbara Riebling, “Milton on Machiavelli: Representations of the State in ‘Paradise Lost,’” Renaissance Quarterly 49 (1996): 573.

  30. Kalevi J. Holsti, Peace and War: Armed Conflicts and the International Order, 1648 – 1989 (Cambridge University Press, 1991), 25.

  31. Ibid., 39.

  32. Bonney, 525.

  33. Quoted by Bonney, 531; see also Jacques B. Bossuet, Politique tiréde des propres paroles de l'Ecriture sainte, ed. LeBrun (Droz, 1967), 114.

  34. Supra, Chapter 5, n. 3.

  35. See James Anderson and Stuart Hall, “Absolutism and other Ancestors,” in The Rise of the Modern State, ed. James Anderson (Brighton, Sussex: Harvester Press, 1986).

  36. Ibid.

  37. Howard, War in European History, 37.

  38. See John Theibault, “The Rhetoric of Death and Destruction in the Thirty Years' War,” Journal of Social History 27 (Winter 1993): 272; Henry Kamen, “The Economic and Social Consequences of the Thirty Years' War,” Past and Present 39 (1968): 44 – 61. Christopher Friedrichs, The Thirty Years' War, ed. Geoffrey Parker (Routledge, 1984), 208 – 215, compromises by estimating the percentage of population loss during the war at about midway between the horrific figures of Gunther Franz, Der Dreissigjahrige Krieg und das Deutsche Volk, 4th ed. (Fischer, 1979) and the skeptical conclusions of S. H. Steinberg, The ‘Thirty Years War' and the Conflict for European Hegemony, 1600 – 1660 (Norton, 1967).

  39. Gordon A. Craig and Aleksander L. George, Force and Statecraft: Diplomatic Problems of Our Time, 2nd ed. (Oxford University Press, 1990), 6.

  40. Watson, 195.

  41. Wedgwood, 526.

  42. See John Locke, First Treatise on Civil Government, undertaken to refute Filmer's Patriarcha.

  43. Kennedy, 75.

  44. Oeuvres de Louis XIV (1806 ed.) i, 14 – 18.

  45. Howard, War in European History, 63 – 64.

  46. William Doyle, The Old European Order, 2nd ed. (Oxford University Press, 1992), 265.

  47. Ibid., 164.

  48. Sir George Clark, “From the Nine Years War to the War of Spanish Succession,” New Cambridge Modern History, v. VI (ed. J. S. Bromley) (Cambridge, 1971), 384.

  49. Losskey, New Cambridge Modern History, v. VI, 191 – 192.

  50. Quoted in Andreas Osiander, The State System of Europe, 1640 – 1990 (Oxford University Press, 1994), 93 – 94.

  51. Ibid., 94 – 95.

  52. Watson, 193, 204.

  53. Ibid., 198,211.

  54. Howard, War in European History, 56.

  55. Voltaire, L'Histoire du regne de Louis XIV Chapter 2.

  56. Emmerich Vattel, Le Droit des Gens, Book III, Chapter 3, Sections 47 – 48.

  57. Quoted in Geoffrey Holmes and William A. Speck, The Divided Society: Parties and Politics in England, 1694 – 1716 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1967), 96.

  58. Quoted in Bernard Fay, Louis XVI ou la fin d‘un monde (Perrin, 1955), 148.

  59. New Cambridge Modern History, v. V, 544.

  60. Ibid., 546.

  61. Ibid., 552.

  62. Ibid.

  63. Quoted in Craig and George, 20.

  64. R. R. Palmer, “Frederick the Great, Guibert, Bulow: From Dynastic to National War,” in Makers of Modern Strategy, ed. Paret, 99.

  65. See Hubert C. Johnson, Frederick the Great and His Officials (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975).

  66. Keegan, History of Warfare.

  67. Ibid.

  68. Ibid., 99.

  69. Quoted in Palmer, 105.

  70. Indeed his tactical innovations prompted innovative responses to such an extent that even the Prussian oblique order, in Jeremy Black's words, “lost its novelty.” Jeremy Black, “The Seven Years' War,” in The Reader's Companion to Military History, ed. Robert Cowley and Geoffrey Parker (Houghton Mifflin, 1996), 423.

  71. By the eve of the French Revolution, Prussia included half a dozen small territories in western Germany that did not border Prussia herself.

  72. Frederick II, “Military Testament of 1768,” in Die Werke Friedrichs des Grossen, v. 6 (R. Hobbing, 1912 – 1914, 248; Montesquieu, Oeuvres Complètes, vol. 29 (Gallimard, 1951), 3; and Montesquieu, “Histoire de mon temps, preface of 1775,” in Oeuvres Complètes, v. 2 (Gallimard, 1951), xxxviii.

  73. Frederick II, “Politisches Testament von 1752,” in Die Werke Friedrichs des Grossen, v.7 (R. Hobbing, 1912 – 1914), 158. Quoted by Palmer, 105.

  74. Consider Palmer, 92 – 93, and Craig and George, 22 – 23.

  75. As Palmer has concluded, “The period from 1740 to 1815, opening with the accession of Frederick the Great as king of Prussia and closing with the dethronement of Napoleon as emperor of the French, saw both the perfection of the older style of warfare and the launching of a newer style which in many ways we still follow…. The seventeenth century, while enlarging armies beyond precedent, had advanced the principles of orderly administration and control. It had put a new emphasis on discipline… turned army leaders into public officials, and made armed force into the servant of government.” Palmer, 91.

  76. George, 22.

  77. Holsti, 90.

  78. Evan Luard, War in International Society (Tauris, 1986), 110. See also Evan Luard, Conflict and Peace in the Modern International System: A Study of the Principles of International Order (SUNY Press, 1988).

  79. Holsti, 92.

  80. Black, European Warfare, 85.

  81. Ibid., 94.

  CHAPTER EIGHT: FROM STATE-NATIONS TO NATION-STATES: 1776 – 1914

  1. Goethe, Faust, The Second Part of the Tragedy, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Doubleday, 1961).

  2. William Doyle, The Old European Order, 295 – 296.

  3. Ibid.

  4. Kennedy, 143. Just as in the first part of the twentieth century, the First World War was known as “the Great War.”

  5. Quoted in New Cambridge Modern History, vol. 9, 253.

  6. Ibid., 311.

  7. Ibid.

  8. Osiander, 196 – 197.

  9. New Cambridge Modern History, vol. 9, 299.

  10. Ibid., 269.

  11. Philip Henry, Fifth Earl Stanhope, Notes of Conversations with the Duke of Wellington 1831 – 1851 (J. Murray, 1888), 81.

  12. New Cambridge Modern History, vol. 9, 273.

  13. See Peter Paret, Yorck and the Era of Prussian Reform, 1807 – 1815 (Princeton University Press, 1960), 208; and Peter Paret, Understanding War (Princeton University Press, 1992), 16 – 17.

  14. Peter Paret, “Napoleon,” in Makers of Modern Strategy, ed. Paret, 126.

  15. Howard, War in European History, 83 – 84.

  16. Paraphrasing ibid.

  17. Charles Tristan de Montholon, Recits de la captivité de l'empereur Napoleon [Paris, 1847], 2:432 – 433; quoted by Paret, “Napoleon,” 127.

  18. Paret, “Napoleon,” 129.

  19. Ibid., 129 – 130.

  20. Cf. David Chandler, “The Right Man in the Right Place: Napoleon Bonaparte and the Battle for Toulon, France,” History Today 49 (June 1999): 35.

  21. Black, European Warfare, 187.

  22. James H. Billington, Fire in the Minds of Men: Origins of Revolutionary Faith (Transaction, 1999), 160.

  23. Consider the following from Act II of Puccini's Tosca.

  Sciarrone: Oh such fearful news, your lordship?

  Scarpia: Why this air of anxious hurry?

  Sciarrone: All our armies are defeated….

  Scarpia: All our troops are defeated
? Where?

  Sciarrone: At Marengo…

  Scarpia (impatiently): Yes, go on, man!

  Sciarrone: No! Melas was beaten!