d military
service with the readiness of men whose energies were already absorbed
in the affairs of peace. To become a practised and efficient man-at-arms
required long training and a life's devotion. So much time the burghers
of the free towns could not spare to military service, while the petty
nobles were only too glad to devote themselves to so honorable a
calling. Thus it came to pass that a class of professional fighting-men
was gradually formed in Italy, whose services the burghers and the
princes bought, and by whom the wars of the peninsula were regularly
farmed by contract. Wealth and luxury in the great cities continued to
increase; and as the burghers grew more comfortable, they were less
inclined to take the field in their own persons, and more disposed to
vote large sums of money for the purchase of necessary aid. At the same
time this system suited the despots, since it spared them the peril of
arming their own subjects, while they taxed them to pay the services of
foreign captains. War thus became a commerce. Romagna, the Marches of
Ancona, and other parts of the papal dominions supplied a number of
petty nobles whose whole business in life it was to form companies of
trained horsemen, and with these bands to hire themselves out to the
republics and the despots. Gain was the sole purpose of these captains.
They sold their service to the highest bidder, fighting irrespectively
of principle or patriotism, and passing with the coldest equanimity from
the camp of one master to that of his worst foe. It was impossible that
true military spirit should survive this prostitution of the art of war.
A species of mock warfare prevailed in Italy. Battles were fought with a
view to booty more than victory; prisoners were taken for the sake of
ransom, bloodshed was carefully avoided, for the men who fought on
either side in any pitched field had been comrades with their present
foemen in the last encounter, and who could tell how soon the general of
the one host might not need his rival's troops to recruit his own
ranks? Like every genuine institution of the Italian Renaissance,
warfare was thus a work of fine art, a masterpiece of intellectual
subtlety; and, like the Renaissance itself, this peculiar form of
warfare was essentially transitional. The cannon and the musket were
already in use; and it only required one blast of gunpowder to turn the
shamfight of courtly, traitorous, finessing captains of adventure into
s