Twiling Of Mil. Trad. Co-Pub E

Gregory Hanlon's pathbreaking study places the activity of Italian military nobles in the wider context of European wars and charts their participation in regional affairs. Prominent in the struggle against the Ottoman Empire and committed to quelling the Protestant Reformation in France and the Netherlands, the Italian army began a noticeable decline around the time of the Thirty Years' War. Spain and Austria were unable to employ many Italian soldiers during the war, and France was not inclined to seek their services. As a consequence, the military institutions that existed in each of the Italian courts gradually waned, and Italian elites turned instead to other pursuits in the Church and in government bureaucracy. Alive to methodological issues and sensitive to the multifaceted nature of war, the author provides both an invaluable account of an overlooked Italian legacy and an important investigation into an uncharted realm of military history, shedding new light on the politics, society, and culture of power in the early modern period. In addition, The Twilight of a Military Tradition gives us a much-neglected Italian dimension to the political and military history of Europe from the sixteenth to the Eighteenth centuries.