Mercenaries and their Masters: Warfare in Renaissance Italy

The ongoing hostilities involving the French and their shifting alliances with Italian city-states often resembled pageantry and processionals more than war. “A march through Italy was an occasion for feasts, spectacles, firework displays, jousts, the expropriation of estates, and occasional massacres,” wrote Robert Payne. “The French aristocracy a

This reform was one of the most expensive things Augustus ever did, and it was close to unaffordable. Unless he made a gross error in his arithmetic, the cost alone is an indication of the high priority he gave it. On a rough reckoning using the known military salary figures, the annual bill for regular pay combined with retirement packages for the

In the years around 1590 the Italian city of Lucca was looking to find a new source of confidential information in Rome.27 A correspondent there recommended that they employ Giovanni Poli: he was said to be far and away the best, and that there was not a single Italian ruler who did not have him under contract. Poli was also a careful man, both sav

As Tilly suggests, the important issue was “effectiveness (total output),” not “efficiency (the ratio of output to input).” In an increasingly violent world, the systems that predominated through five centuries of competition were necessarily those that facilitated the greatest access to resources needed to make war on a large scale.