THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES (21 page)

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.

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,

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 this 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:

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 style
²⁷
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: