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Italy 1636: Cemetery of Armies PDF

241 Pages·2016·137.46 MB·English
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OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 11/05/2015, SPi ITALY 1636 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 11/05/2015, SPi OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 11/05/2015, SPi Italy 1636 Cemetery of Armies GREGORY HANLON 1 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 11/05/2015, SPi 3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Gregory Hanlon 2016 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2016 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2015941228 ISBN 978–0–19–873824–4 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work. OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 11/05/2015, SPi à mes maîtres OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 11/05/2015, SPi OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 11/05/2015, SPi Acknowledgements A mere dilettante in military history, I have benefited from the counsel of a variety of persons more expert than myself in fields that pertain to this study of a par- ticular campaign of the Thirty Years’ War in Italy. The entire description of the battle echoes the wise advice of Malcolm Wanklyn of the University of Wolverhampton, but the continental tactics are rooted in the work of Czech his- torian Pavel Hrnčirik, relayed first to me by Giovanni Cerino Badone. The sounding board for knowledge of the Spanish army and its officer corps has been Fernando Gonzalez Leon in the United States, and for the Neapolitans, AngelAntonio Spagnoletti in Bari. The advice of Giovanni Vittorio Signorotto to look for important neglected documentation in Florence proved entirely sound. I heartily thank the director of the Archivio di Stato of Florence, dott.ssa Carla Zarrilli, for trying to track a battlefield sketch of Tornavento, and Giampiero Brunelli in Rome for elucidating a published source for me. Paragraphs based in animal ethology were helped greatly by my Dalhousie University colleague Simon Gadbois, giving more context to the human psychology behind the military insti- tution of which Marco Costa at the University of Bologna is the principal inspir- ation. Local historians, Franco Bertolli in Lombardy, Mario Zannoni and Giuseppe Bertini in Parma, and Alberto Menziani in Modena, have pointed me to key arch- ival sources. Portions of this work have been presented to research seminars for valuable feedback, at the University of Pavìa for Mario Rizzo and his colleagues, Paris IV-Sorbonne for Denis Crouzet, the Ecole des Hautes Etudes de Sciences Sociales in Paris, for Robert Descimon, and the University of Grenoble for Gilles Bertrand, Giuliano Ferretti, and Stéphane Gal. To all of them my heartfelt thanks. OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 11/05/2015, SPi OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 11/05/2015, SPi Contents List of Illustrations xi List of Maps xv Introduction: The Thirty Years’ War in Italy 1 1. Cardinal Richelieu’s War 14 France’s Return to the International Scene 14 Initial French Setbacks 35 2. Onward to Milan 55 The Opposing Armies 55 The Invasion of Lombardy 66 3. The Ordeal of Tornavento, 22 June 1636 88 The Will to Fight 88 The Spanish Onslaught 105 Second Wind 115 Disengagement and Assessment 133 4. ‘The War Becomes Cruel’ 144 Aftermath of Carnage 144 To the Victors the Spoils 153 Lethal Indecision 168 The Invaders Outflanked 183 Conclusion: The Resilience of Spanish Italy 195 Sources and Bibliography 201 Index 221

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Italy 1636 is one of the most closely-researched and detailed books on the operation of early modern armies anywhere and is explicitly inspired by neo-Darwinian thinking. Taking the French and Savoyard invasion of Spanish Lombardy in 1636 as its specific example, it begins with the recruitment of th
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