‘What a gratifying activity war is, for many are the splendid things heard and seen in the course of it, and many are the lessons to be learned from it.’ Such was the chivalric language, used by Jean de Bueil, author of Le Jouvencel, in the mid-fifteenth century, to describe the feelings of those who participated in military activity. War, however, was more than an opportunity for physical excitement or the chance to win reputation through deeds worthy of being recorded for the benefit of others. War was widely regarded as a way of securing peace and justice: ‘he who desires peace, let him prepare for war’, Vegetius had written in the late fourth century, an approach echoed by Jean de Bueil when he wrote that ‘when war is fought in a good cause, then it is fought for justice and the defence of right’ which might be legal, feudal, dynastic, in most cases ‘historic’ in some sense of that word. War was a last resort, a final, legitimate means of securing and maintaining justice. By the same token, victory was viewed as a sign from Heaven: God attributed victory to those whose cause was just.
Yet not all wars were waged in the name of justice as they often were in the kingdoms of northern Europe. Conflicts in northern Italy arose out of the need of city-states to protect their contadi, or surrounding districts, from which came men, foodstuffs and raw materials, and upon which local prosperity and survival depended; others were intended to defend or further commercial interests through the control of vital geophysical features such as ports and rivers; others still pitted men of ambition against those determined to deny them power. Thus Florence stood up against what was presented, in humanistic language, as the tyranny of Visconti Milan; later, it was in rivalry with Pisa over access to the sea down the river Arno; while its war against Lucca in 1429 was justified as achieving the security of the city and the sources of its wealth.
In the north-east of the peninsula the territorial ambitions of Venice brought it into conflict with others as it extended its dominion on to the mainland (lerraferma), while it also sought to defend its commercial interests as these were threatened in the Adriatic Sea. The very nature of north Italian society, centred as it was upon manufacture, commerce and trade which needed extending and defending, dictated the purpose of war both within the peninsula and on the waters surrounding it. Lacking, as they did, the central authority of the great monarchies, the states of Italy all too readily resorted to war as a means of achieving their ambitions or protecting their interests.
Differences between religious and social systems lay behind wars fought mainly at the extremities of Europe. In the south-east, in what was regarded as both a holy war and an opportunity for territorial conquest, the Turkish army triumphed at Varna (1444) and again at Kosovo (1448), thus helping to keep the crusading light alive. The swearing of the Oath of the Pheasant at the Burgundian court at Lille in 1454, only a year after the fall of Constantinople, represented the enthusiasm for crusading still to be found in a number of European courts. Yet in practice it was only in the south-west that the war against Islam was successfully waged by the Spanish monarchs, who completed the reconquest of the kingdom of Granada from the Moors in 1492. As significant for the future, however, was the socio-religious conflict, with its strong nationalist overtones, which dominated the history of Bohemia during the first half of the century, a war in which the authority of the Church and what was seen as a threat of German domination were challenged by the Hussites who, seeking to create a new social order, engaged themselves in the most important ‘people’s’ war of the period.
The nature of war was undoubtedly changing over much of Europe, although neither at a uniform pace nor in a uniform way. In terms of impact upon the future, the most decisive development was the move towards centralisation of military organisation and command which was to be achieved in many parts of Europe. In both England and France the long war between the two countries had already helped to bring about developments which were to be continued in the fifteenth century. The replacement of the feudal force by the paid army, symbolised by the indenture or contract, was by now almost complete. Those acting on behalf of the crown could discipline armies, while they also ensured, through the regular muster, that numbers and acceptable standards of equipment were maintained.
It was not only in the monarchies of northern Europe that the move towards centralisation, along with the development of institutions needed to achieve this, was carried out. The war fought on the mainland by Venice was to encourage such developments. The chain of command from the senate to the army was reorganised. The problem of how to establish and maintain a working link between the civil government and the captains (often mercenaries) was resolved by the appointment of provveditori who, as go-betweens with considerable experience behind them, were in an excellent position to interpret the ideas and wishes of one party to the other, while at the same time ensuring that the army remained subservient to the will of its Venetian paymasters. The growing reputation of Venetian arms at this period also owed much to the system of control which the long-serving collaterali exercised over both the personnel of the army and important aspects of military life, such as provisioning, without which no army could be successful.
The marked tendency towards centralisation was to be found almost everywhere. In Burgundy a series of military ordinances published by Duke Charles between 1468 and 1473 stamped the ducal authority upon the personnel, organisation and command structure of the army. At a ceremony which may have inspired a similar one in Milan, captains appointed a year earlier surrendered their batons and their personal copies of the duke’s military ordinances. As for the soldiers themselves, they were subject to exercises and drill carried out regularly with the intention of achieving a higher and more effective standard in the use of arms. In Hungary, after King Sigismund had failed to impose change, Janos Hunyadi and, after him, Matyas Corvinus built up armies which were the product of conscious reform, and which were intended to act (as were the castles constituting the system of border defence along the river Danube against the Turks) under royal control. Here as, for example, in the kingdom of Naples, it was the active personal role played by the kings themselves which bound the various elements of the army together and made them act as one.
Centralisation of military structures is one theme. Another is the establishment of permanent armies in many states during these years. The lead in this development was again taken by Venice which, in the early part of the century, set up a permanent force to be further developed in the succeeding generation. Continuity of development and organisation led to men being retained for periods which became longer and longer, while emphasis placed upon training and practice led to the creation of a national infantry. When, in 1454, the Peace of Lodi inaugurated a period of relative order in Italy, the size of armies could have been reduced; yet the notion of the permanent force was accepted and continued to operate in Italy even in time of relative tranquillity. The defeat at the hands of the French in the 1490s was due less to lack of military capability than to lack of political cohesion and effective structures born out of alliances between states which did not yet trust one another.
In contrast to England, whose attempts to create a ‘professional and bureaucratically controlled army’ were as yet largely unsuccessful, France set up an institutional and royal army between 1445 and 1450 based on the acceptance of a number of essential developments. In its origins this army (the compagnies d’ordonnance), which consisted largely of mounted units, was drawn from men hand picked for their suitability; they were to be regularly paid and inspected; and those so chosen were to recognise the authority of the king, who alone had the right to recruit them, thereby rendering all other forces illegal. In 1448, a fresh impetus was given to the infantry when the so-called francs archers were established, each parish (later, every fifty households) contributing one man who, undertaking to train regularly and to make himself available when summoned, earned certain fiscal privileges. Following tradition, leadership was still largely in the hands of men of noble background. None the less, those who were not could still hope to make a career in the army, winning promotion on the way. Not surprisingly, some who served in the king’s new army chose to have that service in this very professional corps recorded on their tombstones. Even in death, it was something to be proud of.
Venice and France were not alone in having permanent armies. Their example influenced other parts of Italy, most notably the duchy of Milan, to a lesser extent the kingdom of Naples, to follow suit, and their existence was in practice sanctioned by the Peace of Lodi. Under Duke Charles, who saw himself as a second Julius Caesar, Burgundy was to develop an army of which, after 1471, the troops ‘of the ordinance’ (de I’ordonnance) were to form the permanent core. In Hungary, the efforts of Hunyadi and Corvinus created an army which was a mixture of the traditional and the new; while in Spain the war against Granada in the closing decade of the century led to a series of reforms (somewhat allied to the French model) which gave the monarchy greater authority over the raising and control of forces and laid the foundations of the country’s permanent army.
At the centre of these changes was the soldier himself. What was his place in the newly developing view of armies? How, indeed, was the army regarded by those who did not belong to it? Traditionally, the soldier was feared and mistrusted. He represented violence, so most preferred to have little to do with him. Could he be relied upon to fight when crises arose? Desertion, in particular by the mercenary of foreign origin, was not uncommon. In the Neapolitan kingdom securities in cash or land might be demanded from outsiders serving in the army; while in Venice a captain who deserted risked having a painted image of himself hung, upside down, on the wall of a public building. In France, serious attempts had already been made in the previous century to give the soldier a better public image by presenting him as a servant of the king whose interests were those of a society at peace with itself. In the fifteenth century the effort to do this continued. To be in the service of the crown was to be in the service of the public good, payment in coin (the peccune publique) being recognition of that service. Public service was regarded as both an honour and a responsibility for the good of others.
Yet, in spite of this, the tendency towards permanent armies did not meet with universal approval. While Robert Blondel saw the growth of such a force as a way of securing the defence of France against all its enemies, Jean Juvenal des Ursins considered the best way to counter the moral and physical dangers which soldiers presented to society was to put them to work on the task which they were best at: making war on others. To Thomas Basin, the army constituted a double tyranny: it was hugely expensive, and it was a threat to liberty. Why not, he suggested, go back to the old days when the defence of the kingdom had been in the hands of the nobility? That the soldier, widely regarded as the cause of disturbance, danger and destruction, should be the guardian of the public good was too paradoxical to win general acceptance. The reaction to change was mixed.
A natural outcome of the growth of permanent armies was the extension, almost as a formality, of the length of service demanded by states such as Venice of those who served them. In France, and not least in Brittany, the men who served for years brought a certain stability to the army. They could also hope to aspire to positions of responsibility within it, a hope based on another change which, already widely debated in the previous century, was becoming a reality in the fifteenth: the advancement of men who, owing more to experience than to birth, were coming to be appreciated increasingly for the contribution which they could make to military success. The aristocratic view of war as a moment of individual opportunity was giving way to another: the fate of every state, large or small, depended upon the collective effort of those who fought on its behalf. The imperative to win, indeed to survive, was now taking over. The requirement to avoid the collective consequences of defeat thus led to societies choosing both soldiers and, in particular, leaders from among those who had good practical experience of war.
Between the ‘old-style’ military hero (of Jean Froissart) and the ‘new style’ professional soldier (of Philippe de Commynes) lay the contracted mercenary leader, or condottiere, a familiar figure in Italian history (above all) since the thirteenth century. Here was the man who supplied the states of the peninsula with the leadership and the forces (in particular the specialist forces demanded by the times) which they could not always provide themselves. He and his men, who might be not only Italian but German, French, English or Spanish, were frequently the object of a love—hate relationship between themselves and their employers, since mercenaries, for all their skills, were often regarded as unreliable and cruel. Yet, in all this, the mercenary leader remained something of a star who attracted soldiers into his service and with whom states negotiated in the hope that he would defend their interests, although he faced risks if he were seen as acting against those of his employers. Francesco Bussone, son of a shepherd who rose to become count of Carmagnola, was executed by an assertive Venetian state for not obeying orders, dallying with the enemy and failing to ‘deliver’ results. Yet, for every Bussone there were others who advanced both their employers’ interests and their own careers, and had their prowess recognised in different ways: titles and lands to enjoy in their lifetimes, state funerals after their deaths, in a few cases memorials such as statues in public places as evidence of their individuality put to good use in the service of the state which had employed them. Such monuments often carried more than a hint of chivalric tradition, a chivalry which persisted in glorifying the individual who made his skills available to political masters in return for recognition and reward.
The fifteenth century was to witness a number of advances in the way that war was fought. For more than a century the general trend had been towards the growth in importance of the footsoldier. The ever-rising costs of war, in particular those involving the warhorse and the increasingly sophisticated armour needed to protect both him and his rider, were having a considerable effect upon the traditional constitution of armies. By the mid-fourteenth century (to go back no further) the cavalry was already suffering at the hands of massed archers who, at a distance of some 200 metres, could have a deadly effect upon it. Yet the day of the warhorse and his rider was far from over. In the favourable physical conditions of south-east Europe, they constituted the central arm of both Turkish and Hungarian armies. Further west, cavalry formed an essential part in the ‘re-formed’ French and Burgundian armies of the third quarter of the fifteenth century, continuing to play an important role both in battle and in the pursuit of those fleeing from the field. The mercenary captains engaged by the states of the Italian peninsula were normally leaders of largely cavalry forces. The same leaders were usually represented mounted on powerful warhorses: the sections of Paolo Uccello’s The Battle of San Romano (probably painted in mid-century) show a scene dominated by horses and their heavily armed riders. As for light cavalry, it was much in evidence in Spain, while the stradiots employed in Italy were the most highly regarded in Europe. Those in the employ of Venice, who came from the far Adriatic coastlands and Greece, were armed with the short lance and bow, but their versatility enabled them to carry either the crossbow or, in due time, the handgun. What these troops lost in weight they more than made up in mobility. Constituting a relatively cheap force easily controlled by the Venetian administration, they were welcomed for their skill in countering the Turks in Dalmatia, Morea and Friuli; while their contribution to Venice’s war against Ferrara in 1482 was only the first of their appearances in Italy in the conflicts of the years to come.
Yet the trend in favour of the footsoldier continued. The Swiss army fought on foot, its pike squares famous all over Europe, its services employed by France, Burgundy and Venice, to name but three. The discipline of Swiss pikemen in the face of cavalry, as shown at Grandson in March 1476, will have erased all doubts regarding the future decisive role of heavy infantry. The squares numbered some 7,000 men who stood in line about 100 metres long, some eighty to ninety men abreast, about seventy ranks deep. In the front ranks were pikes, behind them halberds with which the shocked cavalry troops were hooked off their horses. No mounted soldier had a chance against such numbers of pointed steel weapons which could, and did, move in highly disciplined formation, as at Marignano in September, 1515. Yet it was also at Marignano (on the following day) that the great Swiss weakness, the high vulnerability of dense formations (until that time a source of great strength) to firearms, showed itself when the French artillery made a devastating impression upon the ranks of the redoubtable squares.
Elsewhere, too, the footsoldier left his mark upon the art of war. According to Commynes, the Burgundian practice of knights dismounting in order to fight with the archers was learnt from the English whose archers still had a considerable reputation in the late fifteenth century. In Bohemia, the characteristic style of making war, developed by Jan Zizka, was associated with the use of wagenburgen, mobile wagon fortresses made of carts intended primarily as units of defence against cavalry, but which, tank-like, could be used aggressively to dislodge and drive back the enemy, as Zizka himself demonstrated at Kutna Hora in December, 1421. As the archer, the wagenburg (soon to be imitated by Hungarian peasants) and the pike square all showed, there were different ways of countering the awesome effectiveness of heavy cavalry.
Zizka’s forces also made good use of hand-held gunpowder weapons, already employed by Burgundian armies in the early years of the century. The hand culverin, which fired lead shot and used expensive gunpowder, was used by English armies in France by the 1430s. Fitted with wooden stocks and used with a stand or tripod, it could be used with effect in defensive situations (fired from castle battlements, for instance): likewise it was employed in attack (at sieges, for example) as many defenders found to their cost. In its origins, the handgun was in rivalry with the crossbow, a weapon still susceptible to technical development such as the greatly increased power given it by being made entirely of steel. While crossbowmen still existed, there was no reason why their weapon should be superseded by the handgun. Although the army of Alfonso of Naples included more crossbowmen than handgunners, the use of the gun on an increasing scale, both by the Burgundians in the reign of Charles the Bold and by the Swiss, is well attested by contemporary evidence, archival, literary and artistic. In 1490, the dependence of Venice on handgunners from Germany was recognised and a training programme initiated. It did not do to lag behind others in such vital matters, in particular when the matchlock was about to help create something like a modern firearm.
Of greater immediate influence was the development of siege and field artillery. Developed for siege warfare in the second half of the fourteenth century, it was in the following century that the firearm (manufactured in many sizes) came into its own as a major influence upon the outcome of war. It was not, however, to be a constant development throughout Europe. Although used by Venice in the early years of the century, it was not until mid-century that artillery came to be employed by the republic in any serious way; much the same was true of the kingdom of Naples. In northern Europe, however, the situation developed differently. Urban communities (which could afford cannon) might have their own artillery, in particular for defensive purposes. This was the case in Germany, in the Low Countries and in France by the early years of the century. The war involving England, France and Burgundy, fought largely in the north and north-east of France, advanced considerably the use of heavy artillery in that part of Europe. From the time of the siege of Harfleur (1415) onwards, English policy was to capture towns and military strongholds; much the same could be said of Burgundian war policy in the years both before and after that date. The use of both bombards, or heavy cannon, and a variety of smaller cannon which, fired horizontally from short range and aimed at the lower third of a wall, did much damage to stone defences, was an innovation developed, above all, in France. In Ireland, by contrast, where very different conditions prevailed, firearms did not appear until the closing years of the century.
The first half of the century was a time of experimentation in the use of heavy artillery. Only over a period of some years were the true proportions of sulphur, charcoal and saltpetre developed for maximum effectiveness; only slowly were the problems of how to transport heavy artillery (first on fourwheeled carts pulled by large teams of horses or oxen, and then slung between two wheels, or, best of all, by water) resolved. The ability to vary the angle of fire and, consequently, the range of an artillery piece was to be encouraged by the development of the trunnion; while the effectiveness of that fire was made all the greater by the use of iron, rather than stone or marble, cannon balls of uniform size produced from about the 1430s onwards. The first half of the century was thus an important period in the development of the effective use of cannon. Only in the second half, once initial problems had been overcome and the usefulness of artillery had been proved on the battlefields of Formigny (1450) and Castillon (1453), did it find favour in almost all parts of Europe. By the third quarter of the century, the special value of the new, lighter weapon on campaign having become fully apparent, most states had their artillery trains under the control of centrally appointed masters of the ordnance. In France, the special importance attributed to artillery may be recognised in the continuity of membership of its associated personnel, some of whom enjoyed careers lasting twenty years in the royal service. Furthermore, the crown emphasised the importance of the arm by establishing a monopoly in the provision of saltpetre and by spending large sums to provide the royal army with the cannon it required. Not surprisingly, it was the French artillery, the best in Europe, which most impressed Italians when the invasion of 1494 took place. By then, however, they had already begun to develop the architectural response to artillery, the angle bastion, which not only weakened the effect of a bombardment but enabled the defender to use his defences as a platform from which to counter attack. The traditional balance in favour of the besieged, threatened by advances in artillery technology which had overtaken those available to defenders, was, to some extent, being restored.
By the fifteenth century war at sea was beginning to assume genuine military significance, and the need to have ready access to vessels of either transportation or war was helping to shape diplomacy and influence the relationship between states. Building ships was expensive, and not all states needed to provide themselves with even a basic permanent naval force; the dukes of Burgundy and the kings of Naples were not alone in seeking to further their own war aims by sanctioning privateering by those who had a material interest in such activity. Overall, the century was to witness developments in naval warfare, and (in the Baltic, for instance) in the use made of ships built specifically for war. The relief of the English garrison in Harfleur by a naval force which broke a blockade of the town by both land and sea (1416) demonstrated the importance of the naval arm, as did the use of ships in the dispute between Holland and the Hanseatic League (1438—41) which witnessed the technique of blocking the Baltic in what was a real trade war. In this context the use made of rivers is also significant. These were coming to be recognised for what they were, cheap and often convenient methods of securing inland transport for men, provisions and heavy siege engines such as cannon. Access from the sea up the river Seine to Rouen made the siege of the Norman capital by the English (1418—19) easier and more likely to succeed; both the Turks and their Christian opponents used galleys on the lower Danube; while the Venetians, who controlled the mouths of both the Po and the Adige, and had ready access to shipyards, used river fleets, which included oared vessels as well as galleons (galleys with an upper-deck on which artillery could be placed and soldiers carried) on the main rivers of Lombardy. Their significance lay not only in their considerable contribution to the state’s military achievement; it underlined the fact that in certain states the organisation of the naval arm was now being more centrally controlled as part of a wider war effort. Alfonso of Naples had recognised the need for this; in Spain and England the long-term services of naval captains were retained through annuities paid by the crown. At opposite ends of Europe, the spending of money on naval forces by James IV of Scotland and the sultans Mehemmed II and Bayazid was a reflection that the importance of the sea in both war and peace was now becoming widely recognised.
The war aims of states could be furthered not only by direct conflict but also through negotiation and diplomacy, now increasingly appreciated as important adjuncts of war. In northern Europe the outlines of diplomatic procedure had been developed, particularly by the English, since the late thirteenth century. Yet, in this century, it was in Italy that the most progress would be made. Long accustomed to fierce rivalries between states and to wars waged in defence of material interests, Italy, as it searched for peace, turned to maintaining a balance between those states. Not surprisingly, it was in that part of Europe, where there was the greatest need to set up effective links with neighbouring powers, to establish and maintain alliances, and to be well informed about the economic plans and intentions of others, that the first resident ambassadors (or spies, as some saw them) were to be found. Likewise, it was with the aim of maintaining a balance in a competitive world which lacked a dominant authority that leagues, such as that created at Lodi in 1454, came into existence, their aim being to deter aggression through the threat of the exercise of collective power. The establishment of peace in 1454 brought relative stability to the peninsula during the next forty years, an achievement which led to such leagues becoming part of the European-wide diplomatic scene well on into the sixteenth century.
The rising cost of war fought in the interest of individual states led to the assumption of its expenses by those states. By 1450, a good warhorse could cost a French man-at-arms the equivalent of six months’ wages or more, and a set of good plate armour what it would take him three months to earn; not surprisingly, therefore, the expenses of war had to be met increasingly from the public purse. The provision of heavy artillery, the need to strengthen existing fortifications to counter the new weapon, not to speak of the growing requirements of naval forces, all underlined this point. War was now a huge drag on the prosperity of any community. Right across Europe, in the Ottoman state, in the Empire, as in the Iberian kingdoms, new taxes were raised to sustain the activities of war. Yet in Florence, where new levies had to be imposed in the 1420s, the state’s revenue in the first half of the fifteenth century amounted to only about a third of what was required in time of war; the ten-year conflict between Spain and Granada probably cost the Spanish treasury something over half its annual revenue; while even in peacetime, at the very beginning of the sixteenth century, Venice was spending about a fifth of its wealth on the permanent army. Costs dictated both tactics and the use of particular troops. In favourable conditions the use of heavy cavalry could bring quick results, as did the tactics employed by the Swiss squares. These were ‘high-risk’ tactics of direct confrontation; the less well-off approached war more cautiously. The avoidance of the pitched battle in favour of the skirmish and pillaging, and the manoeuvre which left the enemy morally and financially exhausted, often paid off, and so appealed to the less prosperous.
War helped to stimulate the development of economies associated with it, in particular the provision of armaments and the materials which went into their making. Yew, much of it grown in Portugal, was used for bows, while oak was needed for shipbuilding. Large quantities of wood were required to feed the furnaces for the smelting of iron, much of which came from Spain and the southern Netherlands, used in the foundries where guns and cannons of all sizes were made. Such foundries were normally found in towns, the work of designing and making artillery pieces often being undertaken by men of other, associated skills such as clock making, which needed experience in the precise working of metals. Arms manufacturers came to the aid of towns, such as Malines and Tournai, whose traditional cloth trade was in decline. Granted its origins, it is no coincidence that the development of the use of artillery for defensive purposes should have originated in towns, nor that the hegemony of the dukes of Burgundy over one of Europe’s most densely urbanised areas should have been achieved at the end of a gun barrel. The high cost of individual artillery pieces led to cannon becoming the active instrument of state centralisation which, once achieved, would also be defended with the same army.
The century witnessed a significant development in the literature related to both the theory and the practice of war, which was much indebted to a tradition going back to classical times. Far and away the most famous of those inherited from the past was Vegetius’ De re militari, probably compiled in the late fourth century, whose influence would still be felt for some centuries to come. Freely ‘modernised’ in vernacular translations of the late thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, its appeal lay not in the support it might give to the personal virtues traditionally associated with the fighting man but rather in its rationalisation of war and its presentation of general principles which could lead to success. In a sense complementing the work of Vegetius, the Stratagemata of the first-century Roman writer, Frontinus, offered practical wisdom gleaned largely from the writings of ancient historians. This work was translated into French in 1439 (not long before military reforms were enacted by the French crown), and was published in a printed version first in 1487 and again in 1494 (on the second occasion with Vegetius, Aelian and others). The mixture of the philosophical and the practical taught that victory depended on ‘discipline’, a term which could be interpreted as meaning a sense of ‘teamwork’ within the army; a readiness and ability to exploit opportunities both on and off the battlefield, and, on the part of commanders, a willingness to learn from experience. All had this in common: they could be achieved by training. Berault Stuart, who was to write his Traite sur l’art de la guerre in the first years of the sixteenth century, would underline the vital contribution of this practical characteristic to a successful outcome in war.
When reporting the events of war at the end of the fourteenth century, Froissart had devoted much attention to individual faits d’armes; a hundred years later Commynes could almost ignore them. The intervening years had witnessed many changes in both attitudes to war and the manner of fighting it. Luigi da Porto (‘a hundred against a hundred’), Baldassare Castiglione and others might prefer open combat and the chances it gave for personal valour to be seen and commented on. Cannon might be given names (as many were) and be treated (with some care) as individuals, rather as some of the machines depicted in Roberto Valturio’s De re militari (written in mid-century and printed in Verona in 1472) were given animal characteristics as if to stress their individuality. Yet neither took account of fundamental changes overtaking the waging of war, principally the constrictions being placed on the role of each soldier to act as an individual. However ingenious, neither the machines found in Valturio’s work, nor those seen in the Bellifortis of Conrad Kyeser, written earlier in the century, had much of a future before them; while that most chivalric and loyal of Frenchmen and latter-day Horatio, the Chevalier Bayard, would be killed by an arquebus in 1524. By the end of the fifteenth century it was increasingly appreciated that success in war depended less upon the brilliant feats of individuals than on the collective efforts of well-trained armies. Rather more in keeping with the times and with the arms now becoming available was the Greek treatise, The Tactics, compiled by Aelian in the first century (printed in a Latin version made by the humanist, Theodore Gaza, in Rome in 1487 with accompanying diagrams, such as had already been found in a fourteenth-century manuscript of the work), reflected a scientific approach to the art of war, to which the relative consistency of the printed page contributed a further dimension. Even more significant (it may be argued) than these ‘reprints’ from past ages were the recent works on war written by men who had up-to-date experience of it. Neither Bueil’s Jouvencel, written in the 1460s and printed in Paris in 1493, nor the treatises of Robert de Balsac (d. 1503) and Berault Stuart (d. 1508), relied heavily upon classical models. Rather, they mirrored their authors’ experiences gained in the wars of their own times. Among the first practical works on war written since the late Roman era, they reflected an attempt to lift the subject into the realm of the practical, the specific and the scientific. Such writing represented a marked change of attitude. While God might intervene, upon men fell the main responsibility for the outcome of wars, a point underlined by the diplomatic failure of the states of Italy to unite against the French in the closing years of the century. As if a symbol of the new thinking, Berault Stuart’s career included spells as a diplomat as well as longer ones as a soldier. Diplomacy represented a new expression of the ancients’ teaching on preparedness; there was more to the making of war than what occurred on the battlefield. At the same time, the interest taken in Aelian’s diagrams, the emphasis placed by both Balsac and Stuart upon experience (an idea which, before long, would lead to the founding of military academies for the training of officers) and the insistence accorded to the role of good artillery as the weapon of the future all serve to underline the growing appreciation of human reason, inventiveness and ingenuity in the waging of war. Give no hostages to fortune, Vegetius had advised; fight the enemy only with the skills of the soldier. No longer was it sufficient to attribute defeat to Fortune or to divine displeasure. Men would need to know why it had occurred, in order to work out how the failure of yesterday might be turned into the victory of tomorrow.