An Information Revolution

I want to jump forward to the Late Middle Ages and Renaissance. The Western mind was in much ferment and information technology, broadly defined, was racing forward. There were new understandings of texts and language, of time and space, of cause and effect. Changes in belief were gradually making headway. Armies and soldiers underwent almost constant evolution for a period of something like three or four hundred years.

At times I tend to write like a technological determinist, looking to inventions as the source of change. That is largely because I find it so difficult to separate the various threads of the story. Oftentimes I see things happening as part of a co-evolution. The early portion of the information revolution, which centered on the development of mechanical paper mills by the 1280s, cheap paper, and a consequently lower cost for manuscript books, would not have taken off as fast, or at all, had not the medieval universities provided a ready market. (I wonder too if the development of reading glasses, also prior to the 1280s, was not as important in allowing scholars a longer or easier working life.) The humanism of the centuries that followed was greatly facilitated by cheap paper and less expensive books. Printing, developed somewhere around 1440, needed both cheap paper, the pre-existing market for books, and the demand of educated audience, whether scholastically trained from the universities, or the new humanists. The demands and preferences of the humanists and scholastics came to define the form the printed book took.

So what has any of this to do with wars and soldiers? Well, for one thing, we begin to find military treatises, often with some basis in ancient Greece and Rome, as well as works meant to inspire the nobility going off to war. Initially, these could be quite dear and show an abysmal lack of understanding of the past, even of the terms used by the Romans. It was not until Leonardo Bruni's De Militia (1422) that it was firmly established that Roman soldiers were foot soldiers, not cavalry.  This and the translations of ancient works that followed provided much food for thought in the decades that followed. While we might have arrived at the same point, the Roman examples were important, and at times, critical. This is one of the threads I want to follow in subsequent posts.