Free THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES by Philip Bobbitt Page A

ultimately, destroy her power. Precisely because she was a republic—Venice provided a model often referred to in the
Federalist Papers
by the American constitutional founders—she could not claim dynastic legitimacy, which became a more pressing issue once she expanded beyond her historic city lagoon.
    In Rome, the papacy was held by a Catalonian family, the Borgias. The fact that elections had been manipulated to permit more than one generation of a family to control the papacy only underscored the obvious: the pope, Alexander VI, behaved like a Renaissance prince, delegating papal authority to his children, and using the powers of the papacy, including excommunication, as diplomatic tools. Yet he did not have the legal imprimatur of a prince. Instead he became one in fact by virtue of a papal election, which cast doubt on not only his own legitimacy as a putative political monarch but also on his power to confer legitimacy on his heirs.
    Naples was in the possession of the Spanish king after a century of disputed successions, recurrent revolutions, turmoil, and anarchy. It provided an example to the other cities of what might happen to them if the great kings outside Italy were to invade the peninsula, as well as providing a base to Spain from which further adventures might be launched.
    Let us grant then that these cities were insecure and could profit from the legitimacy and focus of energy that a State could provide—why at this time? Surely there had been insecure oligarchies of dubious legitimacy before? Why did it take the psychological and cultural change that produced perspective in drawing and melody in music and the nude in modern painting—why did it take the Renaissance to create the princely state?
    Partly it was a matter of contrast with what had gone before. Renaissance skepticism about the deference owed to medieval authority fortuitously fed the necessities that led to the princely state. If the universal Church could not confer legitimacy, much less security, on the realms of the Renaissance prince, this was as much liberating as it was dismaying. The philosopher of the Renaissance who was most interested in the interplay between the internal constitution of the State and its external, strategic security wrote:
    If the various campaigns and uprisings which have taken place in Italy have given the appearance that military ability has become extinct, the true reason is that the old methods of warfare were not good and no one has been able to find new ones. A man newly risen to power cannot acquire greater reputation than by discovering new rules and methods. 13
     
    This insight led its author, Niccolò Machiavelli, and others, to the constitutional outlook that framed the princely state.
    It was a sharp break with the perspective it superseded. Whereas the new Renaissance state intertwined the legal and the strategic, the medieval world had mingled the religious and military. As Sir Michael Howard has expressed it:
    Knighthood was a way of life, sanctioned and civilized by the ceremonies of the Church until it was almost indistinguishable from the ecclesiastical order of the monasteries… equally dedicated, equally holy, the ideal to which medieval Christendom aspired. This remarkable blend of Germanic warrior and Latin sacerdos lay at the root of all medieval culture. 14
     
    In a society in which all activity had religious significance, the knight served God by serving his liege and by waging war according to rules laid down by the Church and delegated to temporal authority. The military relationship between vassal and lord, knight and liege, also reflected the economic relationship: the vassal was allotted property and accepted the obligation to provide military service to the lord in war. Thus arose a legal relationship that depended upon both economic realities and military imperatives. Both of these were transformed at the end of the medieval era; whether as a result or as a cause, the spiritual