Cavalieri e popoli in armi: le instituzioni nell'Italia medievale (review)

Paolo Grilli's Cavalieri e popoli in armi offers a much-needed, clearly constructed synthesis of military developments in Italy during the Middle Ages. The literature on the subject is, as Grilli notes from the outset, vexingly sparse. The little that exists is characterized by broad assumption and nationalistic bias. Nineteenth-century Italian writers of the Risorgimento viewed medieval Italian warfare in much the same terms as those laid out by Machiavelli. They emphasized the abandonment of the use of native forces during the communal period, the reliance on mercenaries and the resulting subjugation of Italy by foreign powers in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries--a "distant mirror" of events in their own era. Grilli, by contrast, takes as his point of departure the division of the ages of war posited by Philippe Contamine and situates his findings in terms of current theories of the Military Revolution. He draws on the important recent work of scholars such as Aldo Settia, Franco Cardini, Nadia Covini, Patrizia Mainoni, and others. Rather than compare the past to the present, Grilli makes clear, in his succinct and well-written introduction, that he will deal with medieval Italian warfare in context, on its own terms, as a phenomenon or "institution" distinct from modern counterparts. To this end he stresses the close connection between the military and pacific spheres. There did not exist, as today, a clear separation between war-related institutions and civic ones, nor, more generally, were the private and public realms distinct. Italian states did possess a monopoly on coercion, and therefore violence and warfare were more diffuse and persistent. The point is an important one, and is effectively stated by the author.

The book consists of eleven chapters, beginning with the fall of Rome in the fifth century and continuing on to the initiation of standing forces and the military revolution in the fifteenth century. The author therefore deals with approximately one thousand years of history. He deserves much credit for rendering this mass of material in a clear and incisive form. Grilli does especially well drawing from current Italian historiography. He provides each chapter with useful bibliographies. The long view of events allows him to bring together interesting broader trends, including continuities in military practice from the Late Roman period to early medieval period, and from the Lombard and Norman eras of the early Middle Ages to that of the independent communes of the Central Middle Ages. The strongest section of the book is the discussion in chapter seven of the communal period, the rise of so-called "native" forces and the Guelf-Ghibelline rivalries. The author effectively integrates into the discussion the new revisionist scholarship, including his own fine work.

Overall, the book is more descriptive than analytical, despite promises in the introduction to the contrary. Although Grilli carefully distances himself from the old scholarship, he does in fact occasionally restate well-worn and outdated positions. The problem is largely historiographical. Grilli is at his best with Italian scholarship, paying careful homage, sometimes excessively so, to current colleagues and teachers in the academy there. His use of the work of other scholars, notably of the Anglophone and German tradition, is decidedly uneven. He makes little practical use of the important work of Molho, Bayley, Becker, Hanlon and Blastenbrei (or myself for that matter). In the few places cited, the information is not always accurate. The discussion of the età delle compagnie di ventura (era of the mercenary companies) in chapter nine, for example, is colorful cliché, overstating the importance of the companies, a view long ago challenged by Michael Mallett. The description of military contracts (condotte) needs revision, as does that of the lance, the basic cavalry unit in the fourteenth and fifteenth-century armies. The depiction of the White Company and John Hawkwood was unrecognizable, though my work was cited in that instance. In a sense—a bibliographic sense- the book...