Machiavelli’s Art of War

Conceived during the late 1510s and published by Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) in 1521, the Art of War (originally published as Libro della arte della guerra) is less well known in comparison with the author’s most successful work, The Prince. The book is written as a typical fifteenth-century humanistic dialogue, but its purposes, as well as the tactical models and the military techniques proposed by the author, were innovative and original. Although the Art of War reveals a somewhat utopian character, it is actually dominated by the effort to define the most perfect, yet practical mechanisms for an army. Consequently, the book offers a deep analysis of how soldiers should be recruited, armed, mustered, trained, and even encamped in order to build an ideal type of both warrior and infantry force. Machiavelli’s thinking is based on the postulate that the armies of his times were corrupt, and that in order to acquire a better reputation one should follow the example of the citizens of the Roman Republic who fought for their own homeland. According to this pattern, therefore, an army should assemble citizens and peasants in arms, who fight to defend their own patria or a people’s right to rule itself. However, military practices in early modern Italy were actually dominated by mercenaries who sold their services to rulers and states and sometimes even took over political power themselves. The result of this reasoning is the elaboration of the concept of armi proprie (one’s own arms) as an infantry militia: Machiavelli proposes a new military order which was to be based on the combination of ancient and modern techniques and capable of overcoming what he believed to be the weaknesses of the contemporary tactical models. Their inefficiencies had become obvious to him by some of the key events of the time, such as the Battle of Ravenna fought between the papal and Spanish army of the Holy League and the French in April 1512. The notion of armi proprie, as well as other aspects of Machiavelli’s Art of War, significantly influenced European cultures of warfare, as is revealed by the widespread success of militia experiments in sixteenth-century France and Spanish territories. Indeed, these concepts and features are a significant part of Machiavelli’s conceptualization of warfare that remained a term of comparison and study at least until the beginning of the seventeenth century. In fact, they were also reused by many subsequent military writers, who drew heavily on the book’s content, sometimes to the point of plagiarism.