Free THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES by Philip Bobbitt Page B

structure collapsed as well.
    When rapid expansion of a money economy shook the agricultural basis of medieval society, the effects of this development on military institutions were immediate…. [T]he great money powers of the period, the Italian cities, came to rely entirely on professional soldiers….
    New classes of men, freed from the preceding military traditions, were attracted into the services by money, and with this infiltration of new men, new weapons and new [tactics] could be introduced. [This evolution was accelerated by the development of artillery, which was expensive and favored the offense at the expense of fortifications and the feudal castle.] The moral code, traditions and customs, which feudalism had evolved, had lost control over the human material from which the armies were now recruited….War was no longer undertaken as a religious duty, the purpose of military service became financial gain. 15
     
    Entrepreneurs are hardly likely to provide services for their customers that entail their own annihilation and the sacrifice of their capital. In Machiavelli's first diplomatic mission on behalf of the city of Florence, he negotiated the fees of a
condottiere
engaged in the efforts to regain Pisa. Observing at Pisa the mercenaries sent by the king of France, an ally of Florence in the campaign, he noted that these troops refused to advance against the city, mutinied, and finally simply disappeared. Indeed, during the last months of 1502, Machiavelli was present at Sinigaglia when Cesare Borgia persuaded a number of hostile
condottieri
to meet with him and had them murdered once they arrived. These events confirmed for Machiavelli the weaknesses of reliance on the
condottieri
and the need for a ruthless and decisive political leader.
    Machiavelli devised the following proposals: (1) Florence should have a conscripted militia: the love of gain would inevitably corrupt the
condottiere
who would avoid decisive battles to preserve his forces, betray his employers to a higher bidder, and seize power when it became advantageous; (2) the prince had to create institutions that would evoke loyalty from his subjects which in other countries was provided by the feudal structure of vassalage, but which had in Italy been lost with the collapse of medieval society; (3) legal and strategic organization are interdependent: “there must be good laws where there are good arms and where there are good arms there must be good laws.” 16 “Although I have elsewhere maintained that the foundation of states is a good military organization, yet it seems to me not superfluous to report here that without such a military organization there can neither be good laws nor anything else good”; 17 (4) deceit and violence are wrong for an individual, but justified when the prince is acting in behalf of his state; (5) permanent embassies and sophisticated sources of intelligence must be maintained in order to enable successful diplomacy; and (6) the tactics of the prince, in law and in war, must be measured by a rational assessment of the contribution of those tactics to the strategic goals of statecraft, which are governed by the contingencies of history. All of these conclusions compel a final one: princes must develop the princely state.
    The princely state enables the prince to rationalize his acts on the basis of
ragione di stato
. He is not acting merely on his own behalf, but is compelled to act in service of the State. Notice how the very word
state
undergoes a transformation in this period from its Latin root
status
meaning a “state of affairs,” to the State as an institutionalized “situation.” By extending the power of the prince, the State replaces the lost relationship of vassalage and its obligations to an overlord with a citizen's duty, a crucial change if Machiavelli's conscript army was ever to become a reality. He urged a system in which a civil bureaucracy would replace the strategic and legal roles of