Humans have written about war and warfare since writing was invented. One of the best known from antiquity is Flavius Vegetius’ late fourth-century, De re militari or ‘Military Science’, repopularized throughout the latter Middle Ages and first printed in c. 1473–74 by Nicolaus Ketelaer and Gerardus de Leempt in Utrecht in the central Netherlands. This edition is entirely without illustrations. It was first published in English translation, in print, by William Caxton in 1489. But despite its early resurgence in print, the sixteenth century saw it replaced by more up-to-date treatises, like, for example, Machiavelli’s The Art of War, first published in Florence in 1521. Machiavelli felt that Italy had, militarily, fallen behind many of its European neighbors, and like all good fascists, he looked back to the revered golden age of Graeco-Roman antiquity for models on the proper conduct of war. His work is especially indebted to that of Polybius (c. 203–120 BC), who in his The Histories described the political and military institutions that had made the Romans so successful.

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