Why was it important for the Renaissance to recognize the Roman soldier (miles, milites in Latin) as a foot soldier? Was it really so vital? Consider that many of the Roman sources, Caesar, Livy, Vegetius and Frontinus were already well known, and that they were used as models. Only a dozen years before Bruni worked out the real meaning of miles in detail, Christine da Pisan (also spelled Pizan) had written a treatise called The Book of the Deeds of Arms and Chivalry, in which she largely updated Vegetius' late Roman work on warfare. Authors of the time were doing what we all do, casting the Romans as people like themselves. By and large they lacked historical perspective and Roman soldiers were very like medieval men-at-arms to them.
The new historical perspective of the Renaissance gave a little clearer picture of the Romans and their legions, though it remained confused. A century after Bruni wrote De Militia, Machiavelli would publish his Art of War, a work with a long life. During his political and administrative career, Machiavelli had created both the ideology and structure of a citizen, infantry-dominated militia army. He codified and tried to bring it up to date it in The Art of War. The details he laid out were not widely adopted. The basic ideology was. It was still being reprinted as a useful military treatise for study almost three centuries later.
Of more concrete importance was the fact that the new understanding of miles allowed a better understanding of the Roman legions. We are still working out some of the details, and many of the important points were not clarified even a century ago, but what was known was influential. The mixed nature of heavy and light infantry combined with some cavalry would affect various experiments in military organization down to the Napoleonic Wars. Even more important, the descriptions of the Roman three-line order and their ability to relieve tired troops with fresh ones in the midst of battle inspired Maurice and William Lewis of Nassau in the 1590s to begin experimenting with new infantry drills. While these did not directly imitate the Roman methods, they provided a consistent method for the slow muskets of the time to maintain a continuous fire. From Maurice, it is a relatively straight line to Napoleon, Grant, and Moltke. Tactics and military organization followed a continuous evolution from that point onwards.
These developments might have come about without the new understanding or Roman history, but they might well have taken a different route as well. We cannot know with certainty, but this change, itself a result of a new sensitivity to language and history, that is a cognitive change, seems very important.
For Bruni's work and its influence, see C.C. Bailey, War and society in renaissance Florence: the De Militia of Leonardo Bruni, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1961.
For more on Maurice of Nassau's indebtedness to Roman examples, see Geoffrey Parker, "The Limits to Revolution in Military Affairs: Maurice of Nassau, the Battle of Nieuwpoort (1600), and the Legacy," The Journal of Military History, vol. 71, no. 2 (2007) 331-372.
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