Marco Mostarda

The Italian military professionals in the service of the House of Austria were truly “agents of empire” on an international scale: people whose service was valuable not just because of their military expertise, as rather because they combined their talent on the battlefield with an overall political reliability. The Italians shared the Habsburg confessional absolutism because of cultural affinities, being eager to further the imperial cause by enforcing policies aimed at fully restoring its authority while ruthlessly uprooting the Protestant “heresy”. The Peace of Westphalia made them obsolete: in a new system of sovereign states in which each state was unwilling to impinge on the domestic jurisdiction of the others, where confessionalism was tacitly shelved, there was no room for the old concept of a supranational imperial authority based on medieval political categories. The vision of a religiously militant, universal monarchy reinvigorated by Charles V and backed by Ferdinand II came to an end, and the agents of empire declined accordingly. The Italian military aristocracies survived in the form of local elites within the boundaries of the old states, while retreating from the international stage: hence the perception of their relative decline. It is obvious, then, that the (relative) demilitarization of aristocracies was more accentuated in small states, such as the Italian ones, than in the great powers, due to the greater offer of military opportunities provided by the latter.

The essay aims at retracing the tactical evolution in the english approach to naval warfare from the foundation of a standing Navy Royal by king Henry VIII, through the 1588 Armada Campaign and the 1652-54 First Anglo-Dutch War, until the Stuart Restoration and the Fighting Instructions issued on the eve of the Second Anglo-Dutch War in 1665. Special attention is devoted to the process of formalization of the line ahead, in an attempt to identify the historical and intellectual foundations of this tactical formation destined to radically influence naval cinematics in the Age of Sail. Despite a well-known body of primary sources devoid of any significant new archival discovery, a fresh interpretation of such records – often fragmentary and puzzling – capable of benefitting from the results of the most recent scholarship, is much needed in order to achieve a better understanding of the broad features of naval warfare, its limits and possibilites, during the period ideally comprised between the Armada Campaign and the battle of Trafalgar.

Nowadays the U.S. Marine Corps is caught at the crossroads between a recent past represented by the season of the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT), which saw the Corps committed mainly to counterinsurgency operations in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria; and a future in which it is supposed to return to its true amphibious roots vis-à-vis the challenge represented by the A2/AD strategy of China, Russia and Iran. While amphibious warfare has recently come under increased academic scrutiny, the two volumes of On Contested Shores. The Evolving Role of Amphibious Operations in the History of Warfare, edited by
Timothy Heck and B. A. Friedman and published by the Marine Corps University Press, stand out as Clausewitzian attempt to illuminate the potential future of amphibious operations by means of historical case studies capable of stimulating a fruitful theoretical debate.

The essay aims at identifying in the combat experience of Raimondo Montecuccoli on the field of Breitenfeld the lessons subsequently absorbed by his military thought. Montecuccoli’s ideas are compared with our understanding of the coeval military practice, laying stress on logistical constraints and the stymieing effect on manoeuvre brought about by fortresses in the age of the bastion fort. Special attention is also devoted to the previous interpretative proposals of Montecuccoli’s thought and their intellectual foundations.