J. R. Hale – författare

This book describes the role and organization of the land forces of a renaissance state over a long period. It thus provides a model against which the military development of other countries can be measured in terms of the composition, control and cost of armies. Above all, it redresses the imbalance whereby only the naval forces of Venice have been studied seriously. It is thus an essential contribution to an understanding of the extension and maintenance of an empire by land and sea, and of the strength in troops and fortifications that preserved Venice as the one truly independent state in sixteenth-century Italy. It also adds significantly to an understanding of the relationship between Venice and the republic's subject territories.

This book examines the developments in military technique and technology which both fueled and resulted from the changing nature of warfare.

Beginning with the chapters on warfare in the first three volumes of the New Cambridge Modern History, Sir John Hale''s writings on the subject present an original and rich assessment of war''s place in Renaissance life and thought. The first section of this collection constitutes a major contribution to the study of Renaissance fortifications, their design, planning and execution, and their political as well as their military significance. The second deals with the recruitment and training of officers and men. In the third, contemporary reactions to war are analysed in a variety of social and intellectual contexts. The archival and literary sources drawn on are primarily Italian, in the second place English, but the imaginative scene is that of western Europe as a whole.