Italy 1636: Cemetery of Armies

Italy 1636: Cemetery of Armies offers a history of a single military campaign conducted in northern Italy during the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648). The preceding year, King Louis XIII had declared war on Spain and intervened in the ongoing conflict, but the initial French operations in Italy suffered setbacks. His first minister, Cardinal Armand-Jean du Plessis de Richelieu, orchestrated an ambitious plan for a three-pronged invasion of the Duchy of Milan, intended to crush the Spanish field army and complete the long-desired conquest of Milan. Victor-Amadeus, Duke of Savoy, led the main Franco-Savoyard army into the Duchy of Milan in spring 1636 in a bold effort to break the Spanish domination of northern Italy and alter the course of the Thirty Years’ War.

Gregory Hanlon uses the 1636 Italian campaign as a lens for examining early seventeenth-century military operations and combat. He constructs a detailed narrative of the military campaign, tracing the complicated manoeuvers of Victor-Amadeus’s Franco-Savoyard forces and the Spanish army of Diego Felipe de Guzmán, Marqués de Leganés in the Po valley. Hanlon employs contemporary manuscript and printed sources that reveal the chaos and terror that both armies inflicted on civilian communities in the war zone.

After a series of initial skirmishes, the Franco-Savoyard and Spanish armies engaged in a major battle at Tornavento on 22 June 1636, offering Hanlon an opportunity to rethink battle history in the context of the one of the most vicious wars of the early modern period. Battles were relatively rare events in the Italian theatre, but they attracted great interest in Italian society, generating narrative accounts in political pamphlets, polemical accounts, local chronicles, and other news sources. Hanlon reconstructs infantry and cavalry tactics using contemporary accounts of the battle, along with passages from the influential military treatise by Raimondo Montecuccoli and analyses by modern historians such as Maurizio Arfaioli.

The Battle of Tornavento produced a prolonged firefight that raged for fourteen harrowing hours. Hanlon draws on works by modern historians and military theorists in considering the psychological and sociological dimensions of early modern combat, considering male bonding, small group cohesion, combat motivation for officers and common soldiers. Hanlon incorporates elements of the history of emotions to interpret the probable impact of the battle’s noise, chaos, and trauma on combatants’ psychological states and morale. The analysis relies heavily on Darwinian language, Ardant du Picq’s notion of morale, and Dave Grossman’s problematic notion of combat psychology. The Spanish army finally withdrew at the end of the day, permitting the Franco-Savoyard army to claim victory, although the battle appears in retrospect to have been a bloody draw.

Thousands of dead and wounded lay strewn on the battlefield at Tornavento. One of the most fascinating chapters of Italy 1636 examines the aftermath of combat. Hanlon describes early seventeenth-century medical care, using contemporary treatises to illustrating musket wounds and indicating the treatments available to wounded soldiers. The Franco-Savoyard troops appear to have left the decomposing bodies of dead men and horses on the battlefield for several days, contributing to the growth of disease in the region. As the Franco-Savoyard army awaited reinforcements for an anticipated advance on the city of Milan, soldiers raided the countryside, seeking booty and contributions.

Meanwhile, Spanish forces recovered and began to harass the Franco-Savoyard army’s supply lines. Hanlon explores the resulting raiding warfare using accounts of plundered churches and villages in diverse manuscript and printed sources. Although the Thirty Years’ War earned a grim reputation for brutality and atrocity, Hanlon reminds us that the armies nonetheless adhered to conventions or ‘rules of engagement’ for practicing warfare. The Spanish army of the Marqués de Leganés ultimately forced the Franco-Savoyard army to retreat, preserving Milan and demonstrating the ‘resilience of Spanish Italy’.

Italy 1636: Cemetery of Armies presents a compact study of warfare in early modern Italy. This fine book’s narrative offers an engaging analysis of the practices of early seventeenth-century warfare, copiously illustrated with prints by Stefano della Bella, Jacques Callot, Balthasar Moncornet, and other contemporary artists. The book complements recent studies of early modern war and society by David Potter, David Parrott, and Peter Wilson and repositions the Thirty Years’ War as an international war rather than a primarily German one.

French armies had tried time after time to conquer the Duchy of Milan during the Italian Wars (1494–1559) and came close to succeeding in 1636. But, as Gregory Hanlon reminds us, ‘For the French, Italy was ‘the cemetery of armies’, where their designs for conquest or domination always came undone’.