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Italy and the European Powers The Impact of War, 1500-1530, ed. Christine Shaw (Koninklijke
Brill NV, Leiden,
2006), xx + 317 pp., illustrations, index, ISBN 900415163X, $142.00
Dr. Edward M. Furgol
Naval Historical Center
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As the editor, Christine
Shaw, observes the book is an “assessment of the impact of the wars” (p.
ix) on Italy
between 1500 and 1530. It is an
international scholarly endeavor with Italian, British, American and
Israeli academics producing the volumes fifteen articles. Their efforts exemplify the explosion
of scholarship on the subject in the past twenty years. The book largely accomplishes its task
of integrating military, political and cultural history. (The glaring
exception is William Prizer’s piece on Roman
music and courtesans, which fails to provide any link between warfare and
its subject.) The articles are
based on significant and imaginative research in the primary and
secondary sources. Appropriate
illustrations accompany a number of the articles. The book would have benefited from a
general map of Italy. Unfortunately, only six of the fifteen
articles discuss activity at sea at any length.
How
are naval or maritime aspects portrayed?
Rarely, if at all is the answer. Michael Mallet (on the
transformation of warfare) concludes with one page of twenty on naval
warfare citing Spanish military transport, galley predominance and the
growing Spanish naval ascendancy. Atis Antonovics, analyzing
the French defeat at Naples
in 1503-4, tangentially discusses the importance of maritime transport of
artillery and supplies. The
article on sieges by Simon Pepper observes the value of naval forces in
besieging coastal cities through the transportation of supplies and the
isolation of a target city by naval blockade. Eva Renzulli’s
essay on the papal fortification of Loreta
ascribes the papal motivation to fears of Turkish seaborne raids on the
rich pilgrimage church on the west coast of the Adriatic. David Abulafia’s
chapter on Ferdinand of Aragon and the acquisition of the kingdom of Naples has few references to
naval/maritime affairs. That is
unfortunate, because tantalizing tidbits (such as the Spanish destruction
of Francese Torella’s
pirate fleet, and mentions of Ferdinand’s vision of reviving an Aragonese trading network in the western
Mediterranean, as well as the assertion that New World precious metals
paid for the Italian wars) indicate that the king had a maritime
vision. George Gorse’s article on France and Genoa (1494-1528) has scattered
references to overseas trade, the city’s fleet, its harbor, and brief references
Admiral Andrea Doria shifting the city’s
allegiance to the emperor, but he writes more about the political
symbolism of French and Genoese acts.
Intriguingly, he observes that the French saw the republic as
another walled city, while the Genoese considered it a maritime gateway;
some of the images accompanying Grose’s piece
aptly illustrate those differing perspectives. (And who could resist an article that
includes the passage on a French king personified as a porcupine
preserving his country from an attack by a three-headed Italian
monster?) All in all the
discussion of nautical affairs appears as diversion from the main
preoccupations of the authors.
While that is understandable for Shaw’s article on the Papal
States and Letizia Arcangeli’s
on Milan,
it seems mysterious for Mallet, Abulafia and Grose to adopt that perspective.
The
book provides the reader with some of the latest scholarship on the
Italian wars of 1500-30. Yet
readers lacking a firm grounding in the period will find themselves
lost. D. Abulafia’s
The French Descent into Renaissance Italy and M. Mallet’s Mercenaries
and their Masters: Warfare in Renaissance Italy would prove useful
prerequisites to this volume.
Naval historians will continue to find J. Guilmartin’s
Gunpowder and Galleys the definitive work on the Italian
wars. On the other hand students
and academics researching military, political, and cultural aspects of
the wars will find the work stimulating.
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