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un-Machiavellian attitudes. So, for example, when he claimed that professional soldiers could not be “good men.” A claim which, when put into the mouth of a man who was himself a professional soldier, forced him to turn some strange intellectual somersaults. It also compelled him to pretend that Roman military prowess ended around the time of the Gracchi and devote but little attention to the exploits of a Marius, a Sulla, a Pompey, or a Caesar. Even less attention was paid to other Roman commanders who had the misfortune to live during the Imperial period.
    Why Machiavelli’s work attained the fame that it did remains a mystery. None of his contemporaries took his advice with regards to conscription. However, they do seem to have appreciated his emphasis on discipline and order. He obviously had a good understanding of the differences among the armies of his day. But his discussion of this topic is of interest only to the kind of military historian who takes the Renaissance as his specialty and wants to know, for example, how the Imperial horse differed from the French and Spanish ones. Many of his concrete suggestions are sensible enough. However, being taken almost entirely from Livy, Frontinus and Vegetius (not knowing Greek, and preferring the Roman legion to the Greek phalanx, he placed much less reliance on the remaining ancient authors) they lack originality.
    An underlying philosophy of war may be discerned in Machiavelli’s insistence that rich and well-ordered states cannot exist without strong defenses. In
The Prince
he says that “a just war is a necessary war,” thus cutting through the Gordian knot formed by endless Medieval discussions of Just War from Saint Augustine to Saint Thomas Aquinas. The reason for including him in these pages is principally because he is there and because in other respects he is a commanding intellectual figure. Like a major general standing in the middle of the road, one must salute him whether one wants to or not.
    In truth, much of the remaining military thought produced between Machiavelli and the French Revolution is even less impressive. Why this should be the case is not easy to say. Certainly Gustavus and Turenne, Marlborough and Prince Eugen and Maurice de Saxe and Frederick the Great, deserve to be included in the list of great commanders. Yet even as they fought their various campaigns military thought continued to draw on “the ancients.” Taking their works as the acme of wisdom, it contributed little that was fundamentally new. To cite but one extreme example, when the Marquis de Folard wrote a famous essay on tactics in the 1720s he cast it entirely in the form of a commentary on Polybius and, specifically, the (unsuccessful) combat of Macedonian phalanx against Roman legion. Even to the point where he treated the musket, now fixed with the newly invented bayonet, almost as if it were simply some sort of pike.
    After Machiavelli, the first writer whose
oeuvre
must be discussed on these pages is Raimondo Montecuccoli. Montecuccoli was an Italian nobleman who served the Habsburgs continuously from the beginning of the Thirty Years War to his death in 1680. During his career he somehow found time to take an interest in every aspect of the intellectual life of his times including, not least, the occult. His most important work was the
Treatise on War
which was written in 1639–1643 when the author was a prisoner of the Swedes. However, apparently it was seen as a state secret and, though allowed to circulate in manuscript form, was published only long after his death. Foreshadowing the Enlightenment, Montecuccoli’s objective was to investigate every part of the art of war at the hand of observation and experience. Next he proposed to draw up detailed rules, and join them into a system which would be subject to reason.
    Accordingly, part I discusses preparations for war, including political preparations—the creation of alliances—on the one hand and the