Italy 1636: Cemetery of Armies

241 Pages·2016·137.46 MB·English

by  Gregory Hanlon

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ITALY 1636
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Italy 1636
Cemetery of Armies
GREGORY HANLON
1
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3
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à mes maîtres
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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.
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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