field of Fornovo. During the middle
ages, and in the days of the Communes, the whole male population of
Italy had fought light-armed on foot. Merchant and artisan left the
counting-house and the workshop, took shield and pike, and sallied
forth to attack the barons in their castles, or to meet the Emperor's
troops upon the field. It was with this national militia that the
citizens of Florence freed their _Contado_ of the nobles, and the
burghers of Lombardy gained the battle of Legnano. In course of time,
by a process of change which it is not very easy to trace, heavily
armed cavalry began to take the place of infantry in mediaeval warfare.
Men-at-arms, as they were called, encased from head to foot in iron,
and mounted upon chargers no less solidly caparisoned, drove the
foot-soldiers before them at the points of their long lances. Nowhere
in Italy do they seem to have met with the fierce resistance which the
bears of the Swiss Oberland and the bulls of Uri offered to the
knights of Burgundy. No Tuscan Arnold von Winkelried clasped a dozen
lances to his bosom that the foeman's ranks might thus be broken at
the cost of his own life; nor did it occur to the Italian burghers to
meet the charge of the horsemen with squares protected by bristling
spears. They seem, on the contrary, to have abandoned 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
honourable 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