Five-minute digest
The Art of War
Summary
Dell'arte della guerra, printed in Florence in 1521, is the only one of Machiavelli's political works published in his lifetime. It is a dialogue in seven books, set in 1516 in the Orti Oricellari, the shaded garden of Cosimo Rucellai, where the humanist circle that Machiavelli frequented met to discuss Livy and republican government. The dedication to Lorenzo di Filippo Strozzi argues that civil and military life, now thought to be opposites, were in antiquity closely united, since all the good laws of a state are vain without arms to defend them. The opening of Book I is a memorial to Cosimo, who had died young, and introduces the principal speaker, the condottiere Fabrizio Colonna, returning from service to the Spanish king in Lombardy. Sitting in the shade, Fabrizio remarks that his Roman ancestors should be imitated in hard and manly things rather than in soft and delicate ones. Questioned by Cosimo and later by the young men Zanobi Buondelmonti, Battista della Palla and Luigi Alamanni, he sets out a complete reform of warfare on Roman lines. The first book is the political heart of the work. No good man should make war his private profession, because a soldier who lives by war must want war to continue and will plunder friend and enemy alike; Italy's mercenary captains prove the point. Arms should be borne by a state's own citizens or subjects, chosen from the countryside, drilled on holidays, and returned to their trades in peace. Infantry, not cavalry, is the strength of an army. The following books build the model in detail: arms and training, combining Roman shields and swords with Swiss pikes (Book II); the order of battle, with an imaginary battle narrated as it unfolds and a dismissive account of artillery (Book III); the conduct of a general before and during battle, including the power of speeches to soldiers (Book IV); marching through hostile country, the use of signals, and the claim that modern wars impoverish victors as much as the vanquished (Book V); the Roman-style camp, discipline, health and stratagems (Book VI); and fortification and siege, followed by a celebrated list of general rules of war (Book VII). The dialogue ends with Fabrizio's lament that the Italian princes of 1494 lived in idleness and luxury and were swept away by the French invasion, and with his hope that Italy, which has revived poetry, painting and sculpture, might also raise dead military virtue. Machiavelli's confidence in Roman infantry and his scepticism about artillery look misplaced in hindsight, but the book's central argument, that the military organisation of a state reflects and shapes its political health, influenced writers from the Elizabethans to the authors of modern citizen armies.
Top Lessons
Whoever lives by war needs war to continue
Fabrizio's first argument is that a professional soldier must either wish for perpetual war or plunder in peace, and that mercenary captains prolong wars to keep their pay. Military organisation is a question of incentives, and a state that hires violence buys a permanent interest in disorder.
Imitate antiquity in hard things, not soft
Sitting under the trees of a Renaissance garden, Fabrizio criticises those who copy the Romans in pleasant tastes rather than in discipline and civic sacrifice. The whole book is a programme for a selective, strenuous classicism aimed at institutions, not ornaments.
Health is a matter of command
In Book VI the captain is responsible for siting camps away from marshes, providing shade, tents, fuel and clean water, timing marches to avoid heat and frost, and keeping soldiers exercised. A general who must fight disease and the enemy at once, Fabrizio says, has no remedy.
Getting the future wrong for the right reasons
Machiavelli underrated artillery and overrated the Roman legion, and within decades gunpowder and fortification transformed war. Yet his insistence that armies reflect the political order that raises them proved durable. The book shows how a sound principle can coexist with mistaken predictions.
Verified Quotes
“There have Laurence, many helde, and do holde this opinion, that there is no maner of thing, whiche lesse agreeth the one with the other, nor that is so much unlike, as the civil life to the Souldiours”
“for as muche as the errours that I maie happen to make by writing, may be without harme to any man corrected: but those the whiche of them be made in doyng cannot be knowen without the ruine of Empires”
“How much better thei should have doen (be it spoken without displeasure to any man) to have sought to been like the antiquitie in thinges strong, and sharpe, not in the delicate and softe: and in those that thei did in the Sunne, not in the shadowe”
“good he shall never bee judged, whom maketh an excersise thereof, where purposing alwaies to gaine thereby, it is requisite for hym to be ravenyng, deceiptfull, violente, and to have many qualities, the whiche of necessitie maketh hym not good”
“the whiche thinges thei overcame, with accustomyng the body to diseases, and with hardenyng it, to bee able to indure labour. And you knowe, how that in thinges accustomed, men suffer no grief”
“Then for to avoide infirmitie, thei did flie from places Fennie, or subjecte to hurtfull windes: whiche thei knewe not so well, by the qualitie of the situacion, as by the face of the inhabitours: for when thei sawe theim evill coloured, or swollen, or full of other infeccion, thei would not lodge there”
“those that fall sicke by chaunce, make them to bee cured of Phisicions: bicause a capitain hath no reamedie, when he hath to faight with sicknesse, and with an enemie: but nothing is so profitable, to maintaine the armie in health, as is the exercise”
“It is better to conquere the enemie with faminne, then with yron: in the victorie of which, fortune maie doe much more then valiantnesse”
“Nature breedeth few stronge menne, the industrie and the exercise maketh manie”
“Discipline maie doe more in warre, then furie”
“their studies wer, to prepare the body to diseases, and the minde not to feare perilles”
“bicause this Province seemes to bee altogether given, to raise up againe the thynges dedde, as is seen by the perfeccion that poesie, paintyng, and writing, is now brought unto”
Medical Lens
Book VI contains a compact Renaissance programme of military hygiene drawn from Roman authors such as Vegetius: avoid fens and unhealthy winds, judge a site by the complexion of its inhabitants, provide tents, shade, fuel and good water, march before dawn in summer, keep physicians for the sick, and above all exercise the troops. This reflects the miasmatic and environmental medicine of the period, in which marshes bred fevers, and anticipates later army sanitary reform. Elsewhere the dialogue treats habituation to hardship as a form of training of body and mind; Whitehorne's 'diseases' in these passages usually means discomforts rather than illnesses, a useful example of shifting medical vocabulary.
- Book II
Roman soldiers made the weight of armour bearable by habituating their bodies to hardship; accustomed pains cease to be felt.
- Book VI
How Roman generals avoided disease: fleeing fens and injurious winds, reading local inhabitants' complexions, shelter, shade, water, timing of marches, physicians, and daily exercise.
- Book VII (General rules of war)
The maxim preferring to defeat an enemy by famine rather than by the sword.