The Importance of a Single Word

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.

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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.

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.