whole system of warfare,
renders special military training more and more necessary. In the days
of the Lombard League, of Campaldino and Montaperti, the citizens could
fight, hand to hand, round their _carroccio_ or banner, without much
discipline being required; but when it came to fortifying towns against
cannon, to drilling bodies of heavily armed cavalry, acting by the mere
dexterity of their movements; when war became a science and an art, then
the citizen had necessarily to be left out, and adventurers and poor
nobles had to form armies of mercenaries, making warfare their sole
profession. This system of mercenary troops, so bitterly inveighed
against by Machiavelli (who, of course, entirely overlooked its
inevitable origin and viewed it as a voluntarily incurred pest), added
yet another and, perhaps, the very worst danger to civil liberty. It
gave enormous, irresistible power to adventurers unscrupulous by nature
and lawless by education, the sole object of whose career it became to
obtain possession of States; by no means a difficult enterprise,
considering that they and their fellows were the sole possessors of
military force in the country. At the same time, this system of
mercenaries perfected the condition of utter defencelessness in which
the gradual subjection of rival cities, the violent party spirit, and
the general disarming of the burghers, had placed the great Italian
cities. For these troops, being wholly indifferent as to the cause for
which they were fighting, turned war into the merest game of
dodges--half-a-dozen men being killed at a great battle like that of
Anghiari--and they at the same time protracted campaigns beyond every
limit, without any decisive action taking place. The result of all these
inevitable causes of ruin, was that most of the commonwealths fell into
the hands of despots; while those that did not were paralyzed by
interior factions, by a number of rebellious subject towns, and by
generals who, even if they did not absolutely betray their employers,
never efficiently served them.

Such a condition of civic disorder lasted throughout the Middle Ages,
until the end of the fifteenth century, without any further evils
arising from it. The Italians made endless wars with each other,
conquered each other, changed their government without end, fell into
the power of tyrants; but throughout these changes their civilization
developed unimpeded; because, although one of the centres of n