Towards a new social category : the military

During the early modern period the territory of Lombardy had a central importance in the military dynamics involving the whole Italian peninsula and its relations with the European states. Because of its geographical position, Lombardy was an important crossroad for commercial transits with a remarkable network of roads, also used by the army. The lombard military organization had assumed a prominent position in Italy since the era of the communes. In the course of the three centuries that I shall be considering, military organization in Europe underwent profound transformations, defined by some historians as a “military revolution”. This process was characterized by growth in the size of armies and by the adoption of technical and tactical innovations, which have been long discussed. But a constant that could be defined as anthropological clearly emerges: the mingling of the military world with other social spheres. In current Western culture the war is confined to a circumscribed area. Our society in general is primarily civilian. War during the early modern period involved the whole of society, and the military world was not distinct from civil society. This Long-standing intertwining influenced all levels of political organization, social stratification, finance, economy, culture and daily life. For these reasons, although during these centuries there was an increasing professionalization of the military, we cannot consider the army as external to society, regulated by its own norms, a world to itself, in which developments were exclusively linked on technological, logistical and tactical innovations. In the past this orientation dominated military history, deriving from a perspective taken unthinkingly from the present, which does not satisfies either the need to understand the societies of the past, nor the study of the military phenomenon itself in its historical dimension. Between the Middle Ages and the modern era social rank regulated relations between people, and the development of specialized knowledge, careers and abilities was circumscribed by this social stratification. All these aspects emerged clearly in Lombardy, which was heavily involved in military conflicts, as much as, if not more than, the other European states. It was mostly in the late eighteenth century that there became evident, quite gradually and inconsistently, forms of differentiation and separation of the military from the rest of society in their education, careers, laws, lodgings and welfare institutions.