Medieval and Early Modern Warfare. Medieval
society's hieratic military, political, and other orders
defy historical generalization. Armored horsemen and
fortifications dominated war and an unarmed peas-
antry. But medieval societies were not easily seen as
militaristic, and medieval Christians and Muslims had
good reasons for “just” wars. Citizens of city-states saw
their political and military problems as analogous to
those of city-states in antiquity. The result was that
there were few new generalizations about the relations
of man, the state, and war before the eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries. By that time centralized
sovereign states had taken away the right of declaring
just wars from a broken Universal Church. And Fichte
and Hegel had reconciled the individual moral imper-
atives which Kant had found in the natural right doc-
trines of Rousseau—“the Newton of the moral world”—
with the historical imperatives of social ethics.
Long before Clausewitz, Machiavelli mixed ancient
and modern examples with a philosophy, implicit in
his case, which saw political violence and raison d'état
as normal. “A wise prince... takes as his profession
nothing else than war.... In peace he trains himself
... to find the enemy, to choose encampments, to plan
battles, and to besiege towns.” His view of Ferdinand
of Aragon's actions which grew “one from another”
so that people had “no leisure for working against him”
(Prince, trans. Allan Gilbert, Chs. XIV, XXI) was to be
Bodin's idea that “the best way of preserving a state
... against sedition... is to... find an enemy against
whom they [its subjects] can make common cause”
(Commonwealth, Book V, Ch. v). The Romans, Mach-
iavelli noted, had made “their wars, as the French
say, short and big.... [They led] large armies...
against the enemy and at once fought a battle.” Cannon
favor the offensive; infantry are more valuable than
cavalry. “Fortresses generally are more harmful than
useful.” And “Roman generals were never excessively
punished for any misdeeds; nor... ever punished...
[for] incapacity or bad planning” (Discourses, trans.
Allan Gilbert, Books I-II).
Machiavelli's maxims sound Napoleonic today but,
except in the field of international law, the con-
servative, liberal, socialist, and internationalist sciences
of the management of social violence did not appear
until four centuries later. The events of those centuries
were to simplify the problems of both politics and war.
Gunpowder gradually made all men tall, the infantry-
man again dominated war. Better transportation and
siege weapons forced soldiers to think of grand tactics
involving whole countries. More food, forage, and
metals were available to support masses of men and
horses. The French Revolution had involved many
middle-class citizens. For the first time, perhaps, since
antiquity, enough literate and politically conscious
citizens knew enough about war to “ask the right
questions about... battle” (Polybius, Book XII, Ch.
xxviii a). And Clausewitz was not to be the only veteran
of the Napoleonic wars to write about an art which
was no longer the sport of kings or the secret of cabi-
nets and great captains.
