Read THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES Online
Authors: Philip Bobbitt
Florence was effectively ruled by the Medicis, a banking house whose head, Cosimo, had returned in triumph from exile in 1434 to dominate the Signory, an oligarchical body. By his command of capital, Cosimo was able to affect events throughout Europe, including, for example, the Wars of the Roses (through loans to Edward IV), and to paralyze Naples and Venice by withholding credit that would have been used to finance mercenaries. Yet the Medici ruled by competence, not royal bloodlines, and thus always had to refresh their legitimacy through further successful acts on behalf of Florentine society.
In Venice, the ruling group of merchant oligarchs, the Signoria, had led the city to an expansion on the mainland, seizing towns and fortresses from the Milanese—in an effort to make Venice self-sufficient in food—and also from the Empire, Naples, and the Papacy. Unlike the other cities, Venice was an international maritime power, but her new acquisitions made her vulnerable to a coalition of forces that would, ultimately, destroy her power. Precisely because she was a republic—Venice provided a model often referred to in the
Federalist Papers
by the American constitutional founders—she could not claim dynastic legitimacy, which became a more pressing issue once she expanded beyond her historic city lagoon.
In Rome, the papacy was held by a Catalonian family, the Borgias. The fact that elections had been manipulated to permit more than one generation of a family to control the papacy only underscored the obvious: the pope, Alexander VI, behaved like a Renaissance prince, delegating papal authority to his children, and using the powers of the papacy, including excommunication, as diplomatic tools. Yet he did not have the legal imprimatur of a prince. Instead he became one in fact by virtue of a papal election, which cast doubt on not only his own legitimacy as a putative political monarch but also on his power to confer legitimacy on his heirs.
Naples was in the possession of the Spanish king after a century of disputed successions, recurrent revolutions, turmoil, and anarchy. It provided an example to the other cities of what might happen to them if the great kings outside Italy were to invade the peninsula, as well as providing a base to Spain from which further adventures might be launched.
Let us grant then that these cities were insecure and could profit from the legitimacy and focus of energy that a State could provide—why at this time? Surely there had been insecure oligarchies of dubious legitimacy before? Why did it take the psychological and cultural change that produced perspective in drawing and melody in music and the nude in modern painting—why did it take the Renaissance to create the princely state?
Partly it was a matter of contrast with what had gone before. Renaissance skepticism about the deference owed to medieval authority fortuitously fed the necessities that led to the princely state. If the universal Church could not confer legitimacy, much less security, on the realms of the Renaissance prince, this was as much liberating as it was dismaying. The philosopher of the Renaissance who was most interested in the interplay between the internal constitution of the State and its external, strategic security wrote:
If the various campaigns and uprisings which have taken place in Italy have given the appearance that military ability has become extinct, the true reason is that the old methods of warfare were not good and no one has been able to find new ones. A man newly risen to power cannot acquire greater reputation than by discovering new rules and methods.
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This insight led its author, Niccolò Machiavelli, and others, to the constitutional outlook that framed the princely state.
It was a sharp break with the perspective it superseded. Whereas the new Renaissance state intertwined the legal and the strategic, the medieval world had mingled the religious and military. As Sir Michael Howard has expressed it:
Knighthood was a way of life, sanctioned and civilized by the ceremonies of the Church until it was almost indistinguishable from the ecclesiastical order of the monasteries… equally dedicated, equally holy, the ideal to which medieval Christendom aspired. This remarkable blend of Germanic warrior and Latin sacerdos lay at the root of all medieval culture.
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In a society in which all activity had religious significance, the knight served God by serving his liege and by waging war according to rules laid down by the Church and delegated to temporal authority. The military relationship between vassal and lord, knight and liege, also reflected the economic relationship: the vassal was allotted property and accepted the obligation to provide military service to the lord in war. Thus arose a legal relationship that depended upon both economic realities and military imperatives. Both of these were transformed at the end of the medieval era; whether as a result or as a cause, the spiritual structure collapsed as well.
When rapid expansion of a money economy shook the agricultural basis of medieval society, the effects of this development on military institutions were immediate…. [T]he great money powers of the period, the Italian cities, came to rely entirely on professional soldiers….
New classes of men, freed from the preceding military traditions, were attracted into the services by money, and with this infiltration of new men, new weapons and new [tactics] could be introduced. [This evolution was accelerated by the development of artillery, which was expensive and favored the offense at the expense of fortifications and the feudal castle.] The moral code, traditions and customs, which feudalism had evolved, had lost control over the human material from which the armies were now recruited….War was no longer undertaken as a religious duty, the purpose of military service became financial gain.
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Entrepreneurs are hardly likely to provide services for their customers that entail their own annihilation and the sacrifice of their capital. In Machiavelli's first diplomatic mission on behalf of the city of Florence, he negotiated the fees of a
condottiere
engaged in the efforts to regain Pisa. Observing at Pisa the mercenaries sent by the king of France, an ally of Florence in the campaign, he noted that these troops refused to advance against the city, mutinied, and finally simply disappeared. Indeed, during the last months of 1502, Machiavelli was present at Sinigaglia when Cesare Borgia persuaded a number of hostile
condottieri
to meet with him and had them murdered once they arrived. These events confirmed for Machiavelli the weaknesses of reliance on the
condottieri
and the need for a ruthless and decisive political leader.
Machiavelli devised the following proposals: (1) Florence should have a conscripted militia: the love of gain would inevitably corrupt the
condottiere
who would avoid decisive battles to preserve his forces, betray his employers to a higher bidder, and seize power when it became advantageous; (2) the prince had to create institutions that would evoke loyalty from his subjects which in other countries was provided by the feudal structure of vassalage, but which had in Italy been lost with the collapse of medieval society; (3) legal and strategic organization are interdependent: “there must be good laws where there are good arms and where there are good arms there must be good laws.”
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“Although I have elsewhere maintained that the foundation of states is a good military organization, yet it seems to me not superfluous to report here that without such a military organization there can neither be good laws nor anything else good”;
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(4) deceit and violence are wrong for an individual, but justified when the prince is acting in behalf of his state; (5) permanent embassies and sophisticated sources of intelligence must be maintained in order to enable successful diplomacy; and (6) the tactics of the prince, in law and in war, must be measured by a rational assessment of the contribution of those tactics to the strategic goals of statecraft, which are governed by the contingencies of history. All of these conclusions compel a final one: princes must develop the princely state.
The princely state enables the prince to rationalize his acts on the basis of
ragione di stato
. He is not acting merely on his own behalf, but is compelled to act in service of the State. Notice how the very word
state
undergoes a transformation in this period from its Latin root
status
meaning a “state of affairs,” to the State as an institutionalized “situation.” By extending the power of the prince, the State replaces the lost relationship of vassalage and its obligations to an overlord with a citizen's duty, a crucial change if Machiavelli's conscript army was ever to become a reality. He urged a system in which a civil bureaucracy would replace the strategic and legal roles of vassals. Civil servants would provide a more reliable infrastructure.
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Perhaps the most important official reflection of Machiavelli's statecraft is the statute of December 1505, which ordered the organization of a Florentine militia. This law was drafted by Machiavelli, and the preamble announces some of Machiavelli's fundamental views, especially the idea that the foundation of a republic is “justice and arms,” that is, the intertwining of constitutional and strategic capabilities. It is significant also that a
statute
embodies these ideas because a princely state requires laws, whereas a prince acting alone needs only decrees. This is an essential movement toward the formation of public rather than private authority.
The medieval system had been a rights-based system. Each member of that society had a particular place that determined rights, obligations, and a well-defined role. It is a familiar but erroneous portrait of the medieval era that depicts its society as uniform and colorless. Rights-based systems can in fact yield enormous diversity, because though conformity may be enforced by law, it is not necessarily enforced by that most pitiless of masters, the individual ambition; thus such systems often encourage creativity, as the natural exuberance of individuals attempts to circumvent the rigidity of their assigned roles and the received wisdom. Yet these systems often strike us as irrational in practice because they do not attempt to match talent and performance with role. Perhaps that is why contemporary philosophers today who urge us to adopt rights-based systems often must resort to hypothesized situations like the Rawlsian veil of ignorance, behind which each person must choose a distributive system he or she would prefer without knowing what particular person one turned out to be.
What rights-based systems reject, then, is rationality applied to the contingent situation. Thus the Franciscans imprisoned Roger Bacon for his scientific speculations; the Dominicans preached crusades against the cultivated nobles of Toulouse; the Benedictines erased masterpieces of classical literature in order to copy litanies, and sold pieces of parchment for charms.
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And even though Aquinas, Duns Scotus, and William of Ock-ham were rigorous logicians, only Aquinas applied this rigor to the analysis of their political condition.
The spirit of the Renaissance, by contrast, was quickened by curiosity, piqued of course by the recovery of classical models that provided an alternative to the medieval paradigms, but driven relentlessly by a need for inquiry into the place of temporal man himself. Copernicus and Galileo; Vesalius and Harvey; Leonardo and Michelangelo; Petrarch and Boccaccio—all had this in common: a desire to see man's
contingent
situation as it is. This draws the light of rationality back onto the viewer. In the medieval period, there had been a universal system of customary law, based on the rights of inheritance, charters, and grants. Customary law is the common law of practices. We are inclined today to think of common law as generated by courts, but this is really an abbreviation: common law is simply the customary law of the judiciary; it grows and is modified by the exercise of court practices. The medieval period was almost entirely ruled by a kind of common law, but the generating institutions of that law were seldom judicial courts.
When these institutions began to malfunction—as, for instance, when the introduction of a money economy broke down the rights-relations of lord and vassal with regard to military service
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—and new practices developed (such as the professional, mercenary army), the questioning figures of the Renaissance tried to design institutions that would improve on the merely customary (for example, Machiavelli's plan for a conscripted militia drawn from the Florentine population).
Precisely because the inherited institutions were rights-based, they could not promote new arrangements that were violative of the customary methods. A prince alone could not rewrite the constitutional rules of his society's governance to meet his own needs; that would require an institution that objectified the needs of the prince but was distinct from the prince himself. In Italy, the development of such an institution was catalyzed by the strategic threats facing the city-states.
From 1494, Italy became the prize for which Spain and France contended, with local allies, in the first modern epochal war. All eyes were focused on the security of these fragile cities. Men of letters and artists were urged to design countermeasures to the bronze cannon that invaded Italy in 1494. Leonardo's notebooks of this period contain sketches for a machine gun, a primitive tank, and a steam-powered cannon,
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and Michelangelo repeatedly submitted drawings of fortifications that he thought would withstand bombardment by the new technology of artillery.