EUROPEAN HISTORY / MILITARY HISTORY

THE TWILIGHT OF
A MILITARY TRADITION

Italian Aristocrats and European Conflicts, 1560–1800

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, at a time when most European nations were establishing permanent armies, Italy was pursuing a distinctly different path. Italian states virtually ceased making war with each other and, with the important exception of the Piedmontese, Italian elites lost interest in military affairs.

The Twilight of a Military Tradition describes, for the very first time, this unexpected withdrawal of Italian aristocrats from military careers during the period from the Spanish ascendancy to the invasion of Bonaparte.

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.

"He offers a blend of social, political, and military history, based on an exhaustive search of the voluminous secondary literature (a bibliographical tour de force in its own right) .... Until now, this important historical development has not been studied systematically .... The author thus reopens a subject long neglected, or even distained, and examines it systematically for the first time. He also looks at it as a pan-Italian phenomenon transcending the regional focus or research up to now."
—American Historical Review

Gregory Hanlon, historian of early modern France and Italy, has taught at the University of California at Berkeley and the Sorbonne in Paris, and is currently professor of history at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He is author of Confession and Community in Seventeenth Century France: Catholic and Protestant Co-existence in Aquitaine.