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WorkNiccolò Machiavelli

The Art of War

Machiavelli's plan for an army of trained citizens on the Roman model, set out as a day's conversation in a Florentine garden with a veteran commander.

by Niccolò Machiavelli300 passages held

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Original title
Dell'arte della guerra
First published
(aged 52)
Original language
Italian

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Overview

In August 1512 Florence's citizen militia failed to hold the town of Prato against a Spanish army, and within weeks the republic that Niccolò Machiavelli served had fallen to the returning Medici. The militia was his work: he had drafted the ordinance that raised it in 1506, and it had helped retake Pisa in 1509. The Art of War, written around 1519–1520, defends the idea behind it. A state, it argues, should be defended by its own citizens, trained and disciplined on the model of the Roman legions, and not by the hired captains and companies that Italy's princes paid to fight for them. The book is a dialogue, set on a hot day in the gardens of Cosimo Rucellai, a young Florentine friend of Machiavelli's who had died in 1519. The teacher is Fabrizio Colonna, a veteran commander on his way home from leading Spanish forces in Lombardy — himself a hired captain of the kind the book argues against, which is why scholars still disagree about the choice. Over seven books he takes Rucellai and three other young men through recruitment, arms, drill, a battle fought on paper, camps and sieges. He rates infantry above cavalry and argues that artillery decides battles less often than people suppose. At the close he blames Italy's princes for the invasions that began in 1494, and tells his hosts that their militia failed because it was never raised or trained the way he has described. The Giunti, a Florentine printing house, finished printing the book in August 1521, the only one of Machiavelli's major prose works to appear in print while he lived. Within a year, three of the young men in the dialogue were implicated in a plot against Cardinal Giulio de' Medici, whose favour Machiavelli had been courting. The book was reprinted many times in the sixteenth century, and in 1560 Peter Whitehorne, an English soldier, published a translation dedicated to Elizabeth I. Military historians have since faulted the book for underrating how firearms were changing warfare in its own day, but its demands for drill and discipline gained weight as Europe's armies became professional.

Key concepts

What does delectus mean in The Art of War?

Delectus is the Roman word for choosing soldiers, and Fabrizio takes it literally: a real choice means picking the best men of a province, the unwilling as well as the willing. That power exists only over a ruler's own subjects. Hiring foreigners is therefore no choice at all, since only those willing to sell their service apply, and they are usually the worst men available.

Why can't a good man make war his only profession?

Because a man who lives by war cannot live in peace. He must either work to prevent peace or grab enough in wartime to last him afterwards, and both mean fraud, robbery and cruelty. Fabrizio's examples are the Sforza and other Italian captains who turned on their employers. War should be practised in peacetime only as an exercise, and as a standing trade only by the state itself.

Should a citizen militia be made of volunteers or conscripts?

Neither, strictly. Pure volunteers bring the idle and the disorderly and allow no real choice; outright compulsion breeds mutiny and discontent. Fabrizio takes a middle course: men raised at their ruler's command, moved less by force than by the obedience they feel is owed to their governors, so that their own will seems to cooperate with a gentle compulsion.

Doesn't arming citizens put a republic's liberty at risk?

Fabrizio says the danger runs the other way. Citizens armed under the law and kept in order have never harmed a state and have kept states free longer: Rome stayed free four hundred years and Sparta eight hundred with their citizens in arms. What undid Rome was soldiering become a lifelong trade, and emperors who disarmed the people and kept standing armies and Praetorian guards.

How should an army deal with artillery, according to the book?

By closing with it fast. No army drawn up for battle can hide from cannon or stay out of range, so Fabrizio lets his own guns fire only once and sends light troops forward in open order to seize the enemy's before they fire again. The same logic, he says, served the Romans against Parthian arrows: weapons that strike from a distance are beaten by getting to them quickly.

Why do republics produce more great commanders than monarchies?

Because merit is honoured in republics and feared in monarchies. Fabrizio argues that able men appear where states need them, so a world of many rival states breeds many great soldiers and one vast empire breeds few. Europe, crowded with kingdoms and republics, produced far more than Asia; once Rome swallowed its rivals, military talent withered everywhere but Rome itself.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Citizens in arms against soldiers for hire

Whom should a state trust with its defence: men who live by war, or citizens with a life to go back to? Machiavelli stakes Florence's safety, and the reputation of his own defeated militia, on the second answer.

Fabrizio's first argument is moral before it is military: no good man makes war his only trade, because a man who lives by war needs war to go on, and will plunder, betray his employers or stir up fighting to keep it going. Italy's hired captains are his evidence, and so is Rome after the Gracchi. Against them he sets a levy from the state's own subjects, drawn mostly from the countryside and sent home when the war ends. Citizens armed under the law, he insists, never destroyed a free state: Rome stayed free four hundred years with its citizens in arms.

  • citizen militia
  • civic duty
  • military recruitment
  • military organization
  • defense
  • warfare

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Soldiers made by drill on the Roman model

Can courage be manufactured? The book wagers that arms, exercise and order will turn ploughmen into soldiers anywhere, and that Italy lost its wars for want of the discipline Rome once had.

Good discipline and exercise make good soldiers in any climate, Fabrizio argues, so art counts for more than nature. The middle books rebuild a Roman-style army piece by piece: how the infantry should be armed, how battalions are drilled and formed, and a battle fought on paper in the garden. Infantry, not cavalry, is the strength of an army, and artillery decides battles less often than people suppose, a judgement military historians later held against the book. What outlasted the error was the demand itself, which gained weight as Europe's armies became professional.

  • military discipline
  • military training
  • discipline
  • infantry
  • cavalry
  • artillery
  • battle formation
  • military tactics
  • morale
  • military history

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The general's craft and the princes who shirked it

What does command demand of the one who holds it, and what happens to rulers who leave war to others? The closing books move from formations to judgement, and end in an indictment of Italy's princes.

Camps, sieges, stratagems and the general's rules fill the last books, and the weight falls on judgement: a general should deceive the enemy where he can and, when the rules run out, invent something of his own. Then Fabrizio turns on the princes who, before the invasions of 1494, thought a polished letter and a splendid table enough to rule, and so lay open to the first invader. He admits the limit of his own standing too: a captain of foreign troops who owe him nothing cannot impose such discipline, and only a prince with subjects of his own can raise the army he has described.

  • military strategy
  • military leadership
  • leadership
  • deception
  • siege warfare
  • fortification
  • military logistics
  • retreat

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Within this work

passages held
300
distinct concepts
313
by passages held, corpus-wide
#246

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “deception” and “military strategy”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 23 pairings. 83 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
deceptionmilitary strategy23
battle formationmilitary tactics13
military disciplinemilitary training12
military disciplinemilitary strategy11
military logisticsmilitary organization11
battle formationmilitary organization10
military organizationmilitary tactics10
military organizationmilitary training9
military disciplinemilitary organization8
battle formationmilitary training7
military logisticsmilitary strategy7
military logisticsmilitary tactics6
battle formationmilitary discipline5
military disciplinemilitary logistics4
military disciplinemilitary tactics4
battle formationmilitary strategy3
military tacticsmilitary training3
deceptionmilitary discipline2
military strategymilitary tactics2
battle formationmilitary logistics1
military logisticsmilitary training1
military organizationmilitary strategy1
military strategymilitary training1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. 1503 Minor Political Writings (Scritti politici minori)

    Written on the job rather than for readers: the reports and memoranda of a working diplomat, most of them from before his fall in 1512.

     EN
  2. 1521 The Art of War (Dell'arte della guerra) you are here EN
  3. 1531 Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius

    Longer, later and far less read than The Prince, this republican commentary on Livy is the work that makes Machiavelli's real politics a genuine question. Published, like The Prince, only after he died.

     EN
  4. 1532 History of Florence (Istorie fiorentine)

    His last large work turns the questions of the Discourses on Livy on the past of his own city. Like The Prince and the Discourses, it reached print only after his death.

     EN
  5. 1532 The Prince

    Machiavelli's most famous and shortest book, written in 1513 and published in 1532. Read for centuries as a tyrant's manual — a reading its republican companion, the Discourses on Livy, complicates.

     DEEN
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